An Introduction to R

by W.N. Venables

This tutorial manual provides a comprehensive introduction to R, a software package for statistical computing and graphics. R supports a wide range of statistical techniques, and is easily extensible via user-defined functions written in its own language or using C, C++ or Fortran. One of R's strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced. This is a printed copy of the tutorial manual from the R distribution, with additional examples, notes and corrections. It is based on R version 2.9.0, released April 2009. R is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). It can be used with GNU/Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows. All the money raised from the sale of this book supports the development of free software and documentation.

Genres: Nonfiction, Programming, Science

144 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2002

About the author

William Venables

Reviews

[Richard]

Somewhere in my apartment I'm sure I've still got my ancient copy of The C Programming Language, which is still my mental template of what a language specification should look like. (Actually, the Platonic ideal was Jensen & Wirth's Pascal User Manual and Report with its wondrous syntax diagrams in Appendix D, which made very clear how to write a recursive lexical analysis/parser when it came time to write a compiler, but I used C professionally, not Pascal, so knew it much deeper back then.)

In comparison, this book is pretty lame. The structure didn't seem to have much clarity, and there were quite a few aspects that just left me clueless. I still don't know if the language has overloading, for example (some aspects of rendering a plot seem to indicate that the plus operator may be overloaded in building graphics before rendering? Not sure…)

I'm not complaining too deeply, because there's lots more out there, and this reference is free. I'm enjoying learning a new language for the first time in several decades, and 𝑹 is pretty cool (RStudio makes it pretty painless, too, although I still haven't figured out how to use the debugging facility.) I've just opened up R for Data Science: Import, Tidy, Transform, Visualize, and Model Data which has great ratings here. There's not much on Shiny, though, so I'll need to find something on that when I get to it.

[May Ling]

I got this book as I am learning R for a class. I think it will be helpful, though it appears that R is not so much on the user interface side. I will need to - most likely - attach R to something else that is more interface related to get to the place I need to get to.



Still, as far as languages goes, this really is one of the most straight forward languages I have encountered for statistical stuff. The guide does seem pretty straight forward, but then again, I am a novice, so it was perfect for me.

[Bill]

A very succinct intro.

[Muhammad Ali]

It is basic book on R programming but actually helps little for those who are beginners.

[Mel]

Very Nice introduction to R, but in the middle it's get a little confuse. Unless that this is a very great introduction book about this free and open source programming language R.

[Leara Esparza]

its trash