Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Computational Research

This link via irreal is another “must read” if you’ve never done systems work before (coming from a system person myself, not a data person).

Tidy Data

A huge amount of effort is spent cleaning data to get it ready for data analysis,
but there has been little research on how to make data cleaning as easy and effective
as possible. This paper tackles a small, but important, subset of data cleaning: data
“tidying”.

— Wickham
Tidy Data is a must-read paper.