Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50393 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 498 pages

Review

From the reviews:

"R is nowadays the language used in programming for statistics. Most of the thesis and practical programming are implemented in this language. This is a valuable book for every body involved in data analysis, not only statisticians. Being written by the father of S programming language, as R is S based, the development of the presentation as well as the advises are good for fitting the minds of the students within the roots of the art of programming with R." (J. Scheneweiss, Revista Investigación Operacional, Vol. 30 (2), 2009)

Customer Reviews

The gateway from 'pretty good' to 'expert'
This is not an introductory text, and should not be the first R book in your collection. However, if you are a "pretty good" R programmer and want to take the next step in becoming an "expert" R programmer, this is your Bible.

For me, this book fills the hole of understanding how R thinks. To get a complete and accurate view of why R works the way it does, the author supplements the technical discussion with the philosophy of R, as well as pieces of the history of statistical computing and computing in general.

Others might consider this integration of technical detail with philosophical and historical background (complete with Star Trek references) to be "wordy", but this is precisely why I bought the book. If one is interested only in the purely technical aspects, the thorough documentation on the R website is free. I consider the insights - provided by the mind that laid the foundation for R in S - to be well worth the price of the book.

That said, this book is an invaluable guide (both technical and philosophical) on the road to becoming an R expert. I'm looking forward to putting some dog ears on my copy.

could have been titled _Understanding_How_R_works_
For the past year or so I have been puttering with R, but never really "got it". This book is just what I've been looking for, to understand what R is "thinking". It isn't a cookbook with loads of examples, but a thorough guide to understanding how R works and how to be productive in it. After only an hour, I understand data.frames, and the environment structure better than several nights of struggling with the online documentation. This isn't really a book about how to analyze data, it's about becoming comfortable and expert in R to make it easy to analyze data. Once you understand the tool, the data analysis becomes much much easier.

I agree with the reviewers who say it's chatty, but that makes it very readable. You don't have to work every example to understand the points the book is making. Likewise, it _is_ cross referenced to death, but it's easy enough to read over the links, and when you're trying to make sense of something, the cross references do take you to the right information to round out a picture.

Enlightening
Well, there is not a better way to understand any kind of processes than knowing the way it works. That is exactly the point of this book, and it is done in a didactic, uncomplicated way. You can find your own pathways to interact, program and get more and more from R. It will help with functions understanding and customizations, starting from the basic S language to R's specifics characteristics and goals. This book turns R easier than I have expected.