The New s Language: A Programming Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics

by Richard A. Becker, John M. Chambers, Allan R. Wilks

This book provides documentation for a new version of the S system released in 1988. The new S enhances the features that have made S interactive computing, flexible graphics, data management and a large collection of functions. The new S features make possible new applications and higher-level programming, including a single unified language, user defined functions as first-class objects, symbolic computations, more accurate numerical calculations and a new approach to graphics. S now provides direct interfaces to the powerful tool of the UNIX operating system and to algorithms implemented in Fortran and C. This book should be of interest to students taking courses in statistical computing.

Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Conlon Michael]

Most likely my most dog-eared technical book. I read it, I referred to it, I taught from it, wrote software using it, and corresponded with the authors. My copy looks like the one in the photo -- heavily used!

S was a programming language for statistics, created at Bell Labs by the authors of this book. I dove in. It was spectacular. Very functional. Each to make libraries. Easy to grow. But S was a "product" of AT&T, licensed and some people thought it was expensive.

An open source movement was launched to recreate S as free, open-source software. R was born. R has gone on to be the programming language of chice for statistics, geomatics, all "--metrics" (chemometric, econometrics, psychometrics, etc.) One of the largest, most successful open-source projects ever. You can find it here. https://www.r-project.org

I loved S and I love R.