Hadley writes:

I [Hadley] am going to be teaching an R development master class in New York City on Dec
12-13. The basic idea of the class is to help you write better code,
focused on the mantra of “do not repeat yourself”. In day one you will
learn powerful new tools of abstraction, allowing you to solve a wider
range of problems with fewer lines of code. Day two will teach you how
to make packages, the fundamental unit of code distribution in R,
allowing others to save time by allowing them to use your code.

To get the most out of this course, you should have some experience
programming in R already: you should be familiar with writing
functions, and the basic data structures of R: vectors, matrices,
arrays, lists and data frames. You will find the course particularly
useful if you’re an experienced R user looking to take the next step,
or if you’re moving to R from other programming languages and you want
to quickly get up to speed with R’s unique features. A couple session
outline is available here.

Both days will incorporate a mix of lectures and hands-on learning.
Expect to learn about a topic and then immediately put it into
practice with a small example. Plenty of help will be available if you
get stuck. You’ll receive a printed copy of all slides, as well as
electronic access to the slides, code and data. The material covered
in the course is currently being turned into a book. You can access
the current draft here.

This looks great, and I imagine that what you’d learn there would be useful for other data programming, not just for R.

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