Improvements for Next Iteration

[nick-ulle]

This issue is to keep track of improvements to make for the next iteration of this workshop.

General notes / all sections

• [ ] Check production notes for feedback not listed here
• [ ] Check learner feedback survey
• [ ] Add more about the motivation for learning each topic
• [x] Change chapter order so that Cleaning Data & Automating Tasks comes before Thinking in R
• [ ] Cover function parameter/argument details missing from R Basics somewhere (e.g., ... and lazy eval)

Chapter 1

• [ ] Consider whether the environments content is worth keeping, since it's very similar to this chapter of Advanced R. We could just link to and teach directly from that chapter.
• [ ] Explain difference between package: and namespace: environments
• [ ] Allude to how copy-on-write is part of why preallocation is necessary for loops (thanks for pointing this out @wes-brooks)
• [ ] MAYBE -- Major reorganization:
  • Make chapter 2 an independent workshop about preventing, finding, and fixing bugs, errors, and performance issues
  • Make a new chapter 2 that covers S3, customizing R (global options & startup process), administering installed packages and their locations on disk, ...
  • Add details about lazy evaluation & promises to chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

• [ ] Lead with an overview of typical cleaning tasks: reshaping, string cleaning, coercing types, checking missing values, checking outliers, ...
• [ ] Introduce parse_date_time before fast_strptime

Chapter 4

• [ ] Clarify what topics fit in the "automating tasks" idea---it's a little half-baked right now. Maybe rename it? Candidate topics:
  • Developing non-interactive scripts
  • Handling command-line arguments
  • Calling shell commands and other external programs
  • Reading and writing configuration files
  • Caching intermediate results
  • Logging

[nick-ulle]

Idea: change "Automating Tasks" to "Scripting & Automating Tasks". Possibly a standalone one-session workshop about developing non-interactive R scripts.

That still doesn't make it clear where to put loops, though.

[nick-ulle]

The part about printing output could also be moved into "Scripting & Automating Tasks", to make room for something about lazy evaluation in "Thinking in R".

[nick-ulle]

Also "Automating Tasks" needs a rebrand -- it seems people don't know what this means. So instead of "Scripting & Automating Tasks" something like "Writing R Scripts"

[nick-ulle]

Tentatively split into these major sections:

• Cleaning and Reshaping Data (2 sessions)
  • Session 1: string processing, date processing
  • Session 2: reshaping, joins
• Thinking in R (2 sessions)
  • Session 1: variable lookup, environments, functions (closures, ..., lazy eval)
  • Session 2: attributes, object-oriented programming systems, S3 dispatch
  • Possibly move this to an appendix
• Writing R Scripts
  • Coverage: loops, scripts (accepting input, output/logging, organization, how to run), packages, renv
  • Connector to a session on packaging?
• Squashing Bugs with R's Debugging Tools
  • Coverage: warnings and errors, global options, debugging, profiling, testing