Speed, Testing, and Reporting

This last chapter could have easily been labeled as the “Miscellaneous” chapter. It includes a discussion on three important topics of which R programmers need to be aware. The first topic addresses the methods that can be used to speed up native R code and to allow interoperability between R and C++. The second topic revolves around the idea of test-driven development and how R users can write unit tests in order to improve their code quality and reliability. The chapter ends with a discussion on research reproducibility and reporting within R. [41]. A streamlined and elegant reporting workflow has been made possible by the recent work of the RStudio team and packages such as sweave and knitr [145, 146]. The generation of a sample .pdf report via knitr is presented at the end of the chapter.