R Programming By Example

Planning before programming

Often, people start programming before having a general idea of what they want to accomplish. If you're an experienced programmer, this may be a good way to get a feel for the problem, since you have already developed intuition, and you'll probably end up throwing away the first couple of attempts anyway. However, if you're a novice programmer, I recommend you make your objectives clear and explicit before writing any code (putting them into writing can help). It will help you make better decisions by asking yourself how a certain way of doing things will affect your objectives. So, before we set up anything, we need to understand and make our general objectives explicit:

1. Understand the big picture of the analysis ...