Episode 7: Best Practices for Workflow Management

Posted on Monday, May 28, 2012 | Category: Podcast

Hello everybody, I am finally back with a new episode! In this episode: Hardware issues, major update to RStudio, new forums, and discussion on managing your workflow for projects. I discuss useful functions for executing R scripts and saving/loading R objects for future sessions, and summarize different solutions for organizing R code based on task and via the ProjectTemplate package, along with the importance of version control. Please check out the new forums and let me know what you think! If you are interested in providing a listener tip about R, please call the voicemail hotline at +1-269-849-9780 or record a short mp3 or ogg audio clip and send it to theRcast(at)gmail.com . As always I welcome any other feedback you have. Thanks for listening! P.S. From our Google Plus page, Darren pointed out that I switched forward slashes with backward slashes in my discussion about file paths in Episode 6. Thanks Darren!

Show Notes

• The new R-Podcast forums: http://www.r-podcast.org/forums/
• RStudio v0.96 release notes: http://blog.rstudio.org/2012/05/14/rstudio-v096/
• Cookbook for R by Winston Chang: http://wiki.stdout.org/rcookbook
• Stack Overflow post on workflow: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1434424/315664
• ProjectTemplate package: http://www.projecttemplate.net/index.html
• RStudio Project feature: http://rstudio.org/docs/using/projects
• Version control in RStudio: http://rstudio.org/docs/version_control/overview
• Stack Overflow discussion on version control: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2712421/r-and-version-control-for-the-solo-data-analyst
• Setting up Git: http://help.github.com/
• Theme music provided by WillRock from the Return All Robots Remix Album at ocremix.org
• The closing theme is entitled “The Way” and provided by Jewbei from the Wild Arms: ARMed and Dangerous album at ocremix.org

Episode 7 Time Stamps

00:00 The R-Podcast #007 Best Practices for Workflow Management
00:31 Introduction
01:07 No more TV recording for now
03:40 New forums!
08:25 RStudio update v0.96
12:50 Listener feedback
19:35 Using source(), save(), save.image(), and load()
25:00 load.R, clean.R, func.R, do.R
29:50 ProjectTemplate
40:06 Version Control with Git, RStudio
46:30 Wrapping up: subscribe to the podcast, theRcast@gmail.com, + 1-269-849-9780, Twitter @theRcast
52:44 End

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