ABSTRACT
Good coding style is like using correct punctuation. You can manage without it, but it sure makes things easier to read. As with styles of punctuation, there are many possible variations. The following guide describes the style that I use (in this book and elsewhere). It is based on Google’s R style guide (https://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/ svn/trunk/google-r-style.html), with a few tweaks. You don’t have to use my style, but you really should use a consistent style. Good style is important because while your code only has one author, it’ll usually have multiple readers. This is especially true when you’re writing code with others. In that case, it’s a good idea to agree on a common style up-front. Since no style is strictly better than another, working with others may mean that you’ll need to sacrifice some preferred aspects of your style. The formatR package, by Yihui Xie, makes it easier to clean up poorly formatted code. It can’t do everything, but it can quickly get your code from terrible to pretty good. Make sure to read the introduction (https://yihui.name/formatR/) before using it.
