R in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference |  | Author: Joseph Adler
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Category: Book
List Price: $49.99
Buy New: $41.75
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Rating:  9 reviews
Sales Rank: 18,903
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 640
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.5
ISBN: 059680170X
Dewey Decimal Number: 519.502855133
EAN: 9780596801700
ASIN: 059680170X
Publication Date: December 23, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
What people are saying about R in a Nutshell "I am excited about this book. R in a Nutshell is a great introduction to R, as well as a comprehensive reference for using R in data analytics and visualization. Adler provides 'real world' examples, practical advice, and scripts, making it accessible to anyone working with data, not just professional statisticians."
--Martin Schultz, Arthur K. Watson Professor of Computer Science, Yale University "R in a Nutshell is an ideal book for getting started with R. Newcomers will find the fundamentals for performing statistical analysis and graphics, all illustrated with practical examples. This book is an invaluable reference for anyone who wants to learn what R is and what is can do, even for longtime R users looking for new tips and tricks."
--David M. Smith, Editor of the "Revolutions" blog at REvolution Computing
Why learn R? Because it's rapidly becoming the standard for developing statistical software. R in a Nutshell provides a quick and practical way to learn this increasingly popular open source language and environment. You'll not only learn how to program in R, but also how to find the right user-contributed R packages for statistical modeling, visualization, and bioinformatics. The author introduces you to the R environment, including the R graphical user interface and console, and takes you through the fundamentals of the object-oriented R language. Then, through a variety of practical examples from medicine, business, and sports, you'll learn how you can use this remarkable tool to solve your own data analysis problems. - Understand the basics of the language, including the nature of R objects
- Learn how to write R functions and build your own packages
- Work with data through visualization, statistical analysis, and other methods
- Explore the wealth of packages contributed by the R community
- Become familiar with the lattice graphics package for high-level data visualization
- Learn about bioinformatics packages provided by Bioconductor
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
 Useful and surprisingly engaging January 14, 2010
Gimpel the Fool (Philadelphia, PA)
28 out of 29 found this review helpful
Back in school, I was introduced to using SPSS for use in statistical analysis. While I liked SPSS, it was too expensive for me to procure a copy for my own personal use. A friend suggested that I try R. I was a little nervous about R, because being more enthusiastic about than talented with mathematics, and I was most comfortable with a point and click program. So, before I began, I bought "R in a Nutshell" to learn more. I'm glad that I did.
Adler's book begins with a basic tutorial for R and an introduction to R language. It explains how to use R to draw graphs, statistical analysis and even some bio stuff. All I needed to do was to load in my data, draw a couple charts and compute some t tests and chi-squared statistics.
The book was great, multi-faceted as a teaching tool, and - unexpectedly (and atypically for such works) - entertaining to read. I'm looking forward to using R next time I need to fit a regression model, or do factor analysis. The rare mathematics tutorial that will engage academics, financial traders and baseball stat wonks alike. Nice job.
Gateway into the world of R April 14, 2010
Tony DaBoney (Atlanta, Ga United States)
14 out of 14 found this review helpful
'R in a Nutshell' is the essential introductory book on R. Do not try to learn R without it.
I made two attempts to learn R before purchasing this book. In both previous attempts, I had to abort and use another tool to solve my problem because it was taking me too long to accomplish very simple things in R.
The reason R is hard to learn is that its documentation is organized for statisticians that already know R, but have forgotten a detail or two. There are a few other books on learning R, but they are setup like a college course - complete the entire book and THEN you can actually accomplish something.
R in a Nutshell allows you to get working immediately. Simply lookup what you need to do. The firsts thing I did was load a file and make a histogram. I found that stuff in the section on "Loading Data" and the section on charts. In no time I was making stacked area charts for cohorts. Now R is an essential tool for me - and I haven't even taken the time to learn it well! With this book, I don't have to. I can learn as I go. So I actually use R.
Do not R without it.
Excellent resource for a language with a steep learning curve! April 14, 2010
Jay Thomas (San Francisco, CA)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
While R, the free statistical computing and graphics software environment and language, is quickly becoming ubiquitous in both academia and the corporate world, many new (especially non-academic) users find its learning curve prohibitively steep. To make matters worse, most documentation is written by and for academic statisticians already relatively familiar with the software, and R's syntax is quite different from most conventional programming languages.
Thanks to Joseph Adler's book, there's finally a comprehensive and definitive resource for the rest of us. The book is divided into five sections: Basics gives you all you need to get up and running; The R Language delves into the details of the language itself; Working with Data addresses such topics as loading, transforming, summarizing, and plotting data; Statistics with R covers statistical tests and modeling; and an Appendix describes the many functions and data sets included with the R base distribution.
R in a Nutshell touches on all of the major R use cases and subject areas, including lattice graphics, regressions, tests of statistical significance, classification, machine learning, time series analysis, and bioinformatic applications.
The book's prose is exceptionally clear, readable, and to-the-point. Each function or feature is presented with a full list of arguments and options, and generously illustrated with numerous examples of code, plots, and graphics. As one expects from the best O'Reilly books, there's hardly a page without code snippets and illustrations.
Personally, one of the sections I've found most useful in my daily use of R is the section on data transformation. R's data structures and how to coerce them into forms appropriate for certain types of analysis have been among my top R-related stumbling blocks. R in a Nutshell has taught me techniques I would never have known existed, and has saved me from writing countless lines of code in attempts to reproduce native but non-obvious functionality.
If you need to use R often, this is a book that will quickly become thoroughly bookmarked, and a permanent fixture on your desk.
Worth the price for the tutorial alone May 24, 2010
David Mankins (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
As other reviewers have noted, the introductory material for R can be somewhat opaque. I've read tutorials and books on R, and still feel as though I don't have much of a grasp on how the language actually works. This book starts with a tutorial that sets out the basics of the language, its data-model, and how that data-model is reflected in syntax in a way that makes the use of R clear, and does so in a way that is far more effective than any other tutorial I've seen. The following chapters on the language itself are written in a way that draws you through them.
Finally, I have a sense of how the language works, and how I can make it work for me.
Beyond that, the book has an extensive description of the language itself, descriptions of the Graph and Lattice Graph models of interaction and presentation, and sections on preparing data, common statistical manipulations, and more.
For me, most Nutshell books sit within reach of my workstation, to be pulled down to read about a particular language feature. This book I find myself browsing and grazing.
R in a Nutshell: a good first book on R July 18, 2010
Joel Neely (Memphis, TN)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
R is a statistical computing environment that is free, open-source, cross-platform, and interactive. And now it has its own O'Reilly Nutshell book, R in a Nutshell, written by Joseph Adler. I am pleased to report that Adler has risen to the challenge of the highly-regarded "Nutshell" franchise. As is traditional for the series, this title mixes introduction, tutorial, and reference material in a style that is well suited to a reader who already has a background in programming, but is a new or occasional user of R.
The book's flow was very effective for addressing the different points of view from which I approached it. As a curious newcomer to R who wanted to get going quickly, I was well-served by Part 1, which provided an R kickstart. As a polyglot programmer who is always interested in seeing how a new language approaches programs and their construction, I enjoyed Part 2, which described the R language. As a busy professional with data sitting on my hard drive that I'd like to understand better, I appreciated Part 3, with its practical emphasis on using R to load, transform, and visualize data. As a non-statistician who still occasionally needs to do some number-crunching, I'm sure I'll be returning to Part 4, with its detailed explanations and illustrations of analysis tools and techniques--almost two-hundred pages worth.
This is an impressive piece of work. In a volume of this size (about 650 pages), navigation is crucial, and I found both the organization of the chapters and index up to the task. I was able to follow the instructions and examples through the first several chapters of the book essentially without a hitch. The amount of detail (especially in the later sections) could have been overwhelming, but Adler keeps the interest high and the mood light by drawing on an engaging variety of data: toxic chemical levels, baseball statistics, the topography of Yosemite Valley, demographic data, and even turkey prices.
I won't claim perfection for this book. There were a couple of explanations that could have been clearer, and one or two odd turns of phrase or rough edits. Out of all the code examples that I tried, I found exactly one that didn't seem to work without a minor correction. For a work of this size, that's actually pretty amazing!
As a long-time O'Reilly reader, I see Joseph Adler's R in a Nutshell as a welcome addition to the menagerie.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 9
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