Hadley Wickham wrote:The goal of this book is to teach you how to develop packages so that you can write your own, not just use other people’s. Why write a package? One compelling reason is that you have code that you want to share with others. Bundling your code into a package makes it easy for other people to use it, because like you, they already know how to use packages. If your code is in a package, any R user can easily download it, install it and learn how to use it.

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Philosophy

This book espouses my philosophy of package development: anything that can be automated, should be automated. Do as little as possible by hand. Do as much as possible with functions. The goal is to spend your time thinking about what you want your package to do rather than thinking about the minutiae of package structure.

This philosophy is realised primarily through the devtools package, a suite of R functions that I wrote to automate common development tasks. The goal of devtools is to make package development as painless as possible. It does this by encapsulating all of the best practices of package development that I’ve learned over the years. Devtools protects you from many potential mistakes, so you can focus on the problem you’re interested in, not on developing a package.