(A guest post by Hadley Wickham) Hi all, I’m going to be teaching an R development master classes in NYC June 21-12 and in the Bay Area June 28-29. 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. You can see the material we covered last time at http://bit.ly/odi3ai. 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 at http://bit.ly/dDv5rt. To see prices, locations and register, please see: http://bit.ly/lTft9e. Early bird discounts available until May 31, and limited discounts for students (66% off) and academics (33% off) are available – please contact me for details. Regards, Hadley