Beginning R: An Introduction to Statistical Programming

by Larry Pace

Beginning An Introduction to Statistical Programming is a hands-on book showing how to use the R language, write and save R scripts, build and import data files, and write your own custom statistical functions. R is a powerful open-source implementation of the statistical language S, which was developed by AT&T. R has eclipsed S and the commercially-available S-Plus language, 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. R is also becoming adopted into commercial tools such as Oracle Database. 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 statistical exploration and research.

Genres: Programming

360 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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