Defensive R programming

Avoiding conflict

"Don't reinvent the wheel". Choosing an existing R package is vital and you should ask yourself, is the package mature? actively developed? well documented? well used?. Also take into consideration the context of your problem, are you just messing about a toy project or developing a production server?.

• CRAN Task Views. An useful tool when guidance is needed in what package could be used.
• Updating packages. What do you think about running update.packages() every day? It depends. Is your machine used for testing and experimentation? Then perhaps. A production machine, certainly not! you should test updates on a testing machine before hand.