Getting started writing packages

[mboone]

Packages are a useful way to bundle the codes you made and load them quickly. It may seem that this is an advanced user kind of task, but I feel moderate experience users can grasp the concept of creating their own package quite quickly. You dont even need to publish anything on CRAN, just load it locally!

To get people started I'd suggest looking at Hillary Parkers quick and relatively easy guide to creating your first package: 

https://hilaryparker.com/2014/04/29/writing-an-r-package-from-scratch/

After you get started playing around with that, you'll learn that function writing has its own set of quirks, especially as your codes get more complex. At that point I'd send people to start reading Hadley Wickhams Advanced R online book. Just read all through the 'Foundations' section atleast, to get a good grasp on why certain things do and don't work for you:
http://adv-r.had.co.nz/

 

There's a lot to learn and gain from learning about packages, and users can certainly take it as far as they want. Feel free to share any tips or tricks of package building!