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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="https://xianblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/01/testing-r-code-book-review/"> R – Xi'an's Og</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
<p><strong><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://amzn.to/2lhL5ld"><img alt="" src="https://i0.wp.com/images.tandf.co.uk/common/jackets/amazon/978149876/9781498763653.jpg?resize=201%2C312&ssl=1" data-recalc-dims="1"></a>W</strong>hen I saw <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://amzn.to/2lhL5ld">this title</a> among the CRC Press novelties, I immediately ordered it as I though it fairly exciting. Now that I have gone through the book, the excitement has died. Maybe faster than need be as I read it while being stuck in a soulless Schipol airport and missing the only ice-climbing opportunity of the year!</p>
<p><a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://amzn.to/2lhL5ld">Testing R Code</a> was written by Richard Cotton and is quite short: once you take out the appendices and the answers to the exercises, it is about 130 pages long, with a significant proportion of code and output. And it is about some functions developed by Hadley Wickham from RStudio, for testing the coherence of R code in terms of inputs more than outputs. The functions are <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/assertive/index.html">assertive</a> and <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/testthat/index.html">testthat</a>. Intended for run-time versus development-time testing. Meaning that the output versus the input are what the author of the code intends them to be. The other chapters contain advices and heuristics about writing maintainable testable code, and incorporating a testing feature in an R package.</p>
<p>While I am definitely a poorly qualified reader for this type of <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://amzn.to/2lhL5ld">R books</a>, my disappointment stems from my expectation of a book about debugging R code, which is possibly due to a misunderstanding of the term testing. This is an unrealistic expectation, for sure, as testing for a code to produce what it is supposed to do requires some advanced knowledge of what the output should be, at least in some representative situations. Which means using interface like RStudio is capital in spotting unsavoury behaviours of some variables, if not foolproof in any case.</p>
<p>Filed under: <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://xianblog.wordpress.com/category/statistics/r-statistics/">R</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://xianblog.wordpress.com/category/statistics/">Statistics</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://xianblog.wordpress.com/category/travel/">Travel</a> Tagged: <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://xianblog.wordpress.com/tag/crc-press/">CRC Press</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://xianblog.wordpress.com/tag/debugging/">debugging</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://xianblog.wordpress.com/tag/r/">R</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://xianblog.wordpress.com/tag/r-package/">R package</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://xianblog.wordpress.com/tag/rstudio/">RStudio</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://xianblog.wordpress.com/tag/testing/">testing</a>, <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://xianblog.wordpress.com/tag/testing-r-code/">Testing R Code</a> <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/gocomments/xianblog.wordpress.com/32788/"><img alt="" src="http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/xianblog.wordpress.com/32788/" border="0"></a> <img alt="" src="https://i1.wp.com/pixel.wp.com/b.gif?resize=1%2C1&ssl=1" border="0" data-recalc-dims="1"></p>
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