// the find
hadley/adv-r
Advanced R: a book
This is the source for Hadley Wickham's Advanced R, the reference book on R's object systems, environments, functional programming, and metaprogramming. It's for R users who've moved past scripting and want to understand how the language actually works under the hood, not a library or tool.
The content itself is unusually good — clear, technically accurate treatment of things most R users never learn properly (S3/S4/R6 dispatch, lazy evaluation, quasiquotation). The book builds via bookdown with a GitHub Actions workflow, so the live site stays in sync with the Rmd source on every push. One Rmd file per chapter keeps the repo easy to navigate and makes it a decent reference layout for anyone building their own bookdown project. Fork count (1687) relative to stars suggests people are actually using this as a working copy, not just starring it.
It's a book, not code — there's nothing to adopt or integrate, so evaluating it as a repo is a bit of a category error. The diagram pipeline is genuinely bad: source diagrams are OmniGraffle files (Mac-only, proprietary), and the README's build instructions for those and for the publisher zip are manual shell steps with no automation, meaning a contributor without a Mac can't touch any figure. There's no visible CI beyond the render step — no link checking, no prose linting, so broken cross-references or stale content depend entirely on manual review. Last push was March 2025, so it's not actively evolving even though R itself (native pipes, newer S7-ish patterns) has moved since.