Three useful (to me) R patterns
This post was featured on the R Weekly highlights podcast hosted by Eric Nantz and Mike Thomas. I’m happy to report that I thought “oh but I know a better way to write that code!” a few times lately when reading old scripts of mine, or scripts by others. It’s a good feeling because it shows progress! I’ve tooted about all three things I’ll present in this post: After reading Julia Evans’ post about blogging, I decided to train the blogging muscle a bit using these low-hanging fruits/toots1.
git and GitHub in R for the casual user
If you’ve been taught git and GitHub but practice so rarely that you’re discouraged, what should you do to re-start more easily? Let’s imagine you have to, or really want to, use git and GitHub for your next analysis project. Here’s what I would recommend… I assume you already own a GitHub account. If not, refer to happygitwithr guidance. Thanks to the people who shared recommendations on Mastodon, whose names are acknowledged in the rest of the post!
RSS, fantastic tool for keeping up-to-date
I found an excuse to blog about XML again! Yes, RSS feeds are in practice XML, but for most people, that’s not why they are cool. An RSS (really simple syndication) feed is metadata about all, or the most recent posts published by a website: publication date, content or summary, etc. Much handier in my opinion to use that to get updates among Twitter “noise”. RSS feed example Have a look at the RSS feed for this blog over at https://masalmon.
Why I like XPath, XML and HTML
One of my favorite tool is XPath, the query language for exploring XML and HTML trees. In this post, I will highlight a few use cases of this “angle-bracket crunching tool” and hope to convince you that it’s an awesome thing to know about and play with. Many thanks to Christophe Dervieux for useful feedback on this post! Mille mercis ! Brief intro to XPath in R Say I have some XML,
8 (octo!) GitHub Tips
I’m spending quite a lot of my working time on GitHub, so have taken some habits. Maybe some of them can be useful to you! 1: How to get started I’ve never actually taught git and GitHub, but I like sharing these useful links: Happy Git and GitHub for the useR by Jenny Bryan, the STAT 545 TAs, Jim Hester. It includes a big picture section “Why Git? Why GitHub?