Book review — The Book of R: A First Course in Programming and Statistics

by Tilman M. Davies, no starch press, 2016

You might not have ever heard of the programming language R but, if you’re doing data analysis, it might be just the language you need. And this particular book on R is one that is likely to teach you everything you might need to know. Yes, I mean everything.

A full two inches thick and nearly 800 pages long, The Book of R promises to teach you everything you need to be productive in using this language – that includes the basic syntax of the language, programming techniques, statistics and probability, testing and modeling, and graphics along with how to install the language and related packages on your system.

And, if you feel a little tremor of intimidation when you lift this book off of your shelf or start slipping your fingers through its pages, try to calm yourself. The exercises and explanations the book provides on how to use this language to build your own data analysis tools are likely to be the best you will find anywhere and you’re likely to find all the help you need as you read through each chapter. This is a book meant for beginners whether you’re new to programming or new to statistics or both. And I expect that you’ll emerge from the appendices feeling like you’ve just been through a couple really good courses with an excellent professor.

Scanning the table of contents illustrates the length and depth of the covered material.

Table of Contents

Preface

PART I THE LANGUAGE 1 Getting Started 2 Numerics, Arithmetic, Assignment, and Vectors 3 Matrices and Arrays 4 Non-numeric Values 5 Lists and Data Frames 6 Special Values, Classes, and Coercion 7 Basic Plotting 8 Reading and Writing Files

PART II PROGRAMMING 9 Calling Functions 10 Conditions and Loops 11 Writing Functions 12 Exceptions, Timings, and Visibility

PART III STATISTICS AND PROBABILITY 13 Elementary Statistics 14 Basic Data Visualization 15 Probability 16 Common Probability Distributions

PART IV STATISTICAL TESTING AND MODELING 17 Sampling Distributions and Confidence 18 Hypothesis Testing 19 Analysis of Variance 20 Simple Linear Regression 21 Multiple Linear Regression 22 Linear Model Selection and Diagnostics

PART V ADVANCED GRAPHICS 23 Advanced Plot Customization 24 Going Further with the Grammar of Graphics 25 Defining Colors and Plotting in Higher Dimensions 26 Interactive 3D Plots (AVAILABLE NOW)

APPENDICES A Installing R and Contributed Packages B Working with RStudio (AVAILABLE NOW)

Bibliography

View the detailed Table of Contents (PDF) View the Index (PDF)

You can also read about this book on the no starch press site.

Not only does the book take you through all the material you need to go from knowing nothing to becoming adept at using this language for statistical programming, but it contains plenty of exercises to help you practice and gain confidence in your newly developed skills. And, to add to that, solutions (with source code) for the exercises are available in a file that you can download from the web site.

Sandra HS

Extremely well written with excellent explanations and examples, this book fully accomplishes the goal of providing the reading with both the programming and statistical skills required to become proficient with this language. I am nothing short of amazed at the consistent quality and clarity of the text and the utility of the exercises.

Background

The language R is not a new language. It was initially released in 1994 and the first stable beta edition was released in 2000. It’s based heavily on a language called S developed in the 60’s and 70’s. It’s called R instead of the expected T because its name was based on the developers’ shared first initial. Anyone who’s been using Unix as long as I might remember that the language C followed on the heals of one called B. Neither S nor R, however, implies that we progressed from D through Q.

R is available for numerous operating systems, including Linux, Solaris, Windows, and Mac OS X. It’s a language that has been specifically built to be a software environment for statistical computing and graphics, not a general purpose programming language such as C.

Tilman M. Davies, the author of The Book of R, teaches at the University of Otago in New Zealand and has been programming in R for 10 years.