Beginning R: An Introduction to Statistical Programming

by Larry Pace

Beginning R, Second Edition is a hands-on book showing how to use the R language, write and save R scripts, read in data files, and write custom statistical functions as well as use built in functions. This book shows the use of R in specific cases such as one-way ANOVA analysis, linear and logistic regression, data visualization, parallel processing, bootstrapping, and more. It takes a hands-on, example-based approach incorporating best practices with clear explanations of the statistics being done. It has been completely re-written since the first edition to make use of the latest packages and features in R version 3. R is a powerful open-source language and programming environment for statistics and has become the de facto standard for doing, teaching, and learning computational statistics. R is both an object-oriented language and a functional language that is easy to learn, easy to use, and completely free. A large community of dedicated R users and programmers provides an excellent source of R code, functions, and data sets, with a constantly evolving ecosystem of packages providing new functionality for data analysis. R has also become popular in commercial use at companies such as Microsoft, Google, and Oracle. Your investment in learning R is sure to pay off in the long term as R continues to grow into the go to language for data analysis and research. What You Will

Genres: Programming

350 pages, Paperback

First published September 26, 2012

Reviews

[Lime Street Labrador · Rating 2 out of 5]

No good

[BCS · Rating 5 out of 5]

R is rightly acknowledged to be an open-source language and programming environment with accompanying online help, therefore any book has to be able to add value beyond what is already freely available.

This book is both well structured and written, supported by clear examples and supplementary material. It is highly recommended as a teaching resource, its chapter on Input and Output is particularly useful and comprehensively explained.

The only negative seems rather petty - some of the text, font and size could be an issue for some readers. Whilst content is always more important than presentation, in this case the latter could be improved.

Overall, this is an excellent book for students and practitioners, or individuals with an interest in a related topic, such as information visualisation and big data analytics.

Priced at $39.99 the paperback also represents good value for money.

Review by Deryn Graham FBCS, Senior Lecturer
Originally posted: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/...

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