"Brings together the skills and tools needed for doing and presenting computational research. Using straightforward examples, the book takes you through an entire reproducible research workflow"--
This book overpromises a bit. Gandrud claims to want to talk about sustainable ways to conduct reproducible research, which is a very laudable goal. He sketches out a project workflow to do this, but then he gets seduced by the weeds and starts just giving a tutorial about various actual coding commands in R, knitr, R Markdown, etc. He ends up giving relatively very short shrift to discussing and analyzing the actual workflow itself, its mechanics, pros and cons, ramifications, etc. Beyond that, there are good tidbits scattered throughout, as there usually are in these types of walkthrough books. I appreciate Gandrud's perspectives throughout. The main points are fine, I just wish he had dwelt on them more.
One of the best among many books on data science and reproducible research using R or Python. This book focuses on the entire flow of the reproducible research using R. It also points some interesting issues such as citing reproducible research, licensing it, etc. at the end of the book. Also it has a great cover summarizing the book as good as its title.
A not reproducible book on reproducible research would be awkward. The book provides all the source code and the text that can be run to generate the book itself at https://github.com/christophergandrud....
I learned a lot from this book. The book files are available in GitHub, but some files are missing, so that some of the files don't run without errors. This is disappointing given that the aim of the book is to make work reproducible and code future-proof. Would like to see a discussion of new "container tools" like Docker, which would be more useful and closer to the aims of the book then sections like "12.3 Slideshows".