Hadley Wickham is writing what will surely be a great book about the basics of R packages. And Hilary Parker wrote a very influential post on how to write an R package. So it seems like that topic is well covered.

Nevertheless, I’d been thinking for some time that I should write another minimal tutorial with an alliterative name, on how to turn R code into a package. And it does seem valuable to have a diversity of resources on such an important topic. (R packages are the best way to distribute R code, or just to keep track of your own personal R code, as part of a reproducible research process.)

So I’m going ahead with it, even though it doesn’t seem necessary: the R package primer.

It’s not completely done, but the basic stuff is there.