R in Action | Hacker News Reader

R in Action

johndcook.com

72 pointsColinWright8 comments

Will definitely check out this book. I recently learned some R and just used it for a very specific type of programming task (Morphometrics for a biologist).

Very happy to have learned a new language outside of my normal Python/PHP/JavaScript realm. If you're looking to learn a new language that is a bit different than what you might be used to and want to brush up on some math, I highly recommend playing with R for a while.

Another book to checkout is O'Reilly's Data Analysis with Open Source Tools, which has sections on R and NumPy.

By the review, this sounds like it could be a great book. I've read, err skimmed, plenty of R books including the official documentation. Everything I've read so far about R was quite obviously written for a different audience. This seems to be aimed at telling visual stories with data, which is the only part of R I've ever wanted to learn.

I'm looking forward to digging into this book as well. I've gone through most of R Graphs (Packt) and R Cookbook (O'Reilly) which are great for learning the nuts and bolts of R and R in Action looks to be the next step.

It's been a while since I've read it, but I was one of the technical readers for this book—and now that it's done, I need to dig it out and look at it again.

I wanted to get involved in reading this one because of all the great stuff I'd heard about R (mostly on HN, but also from someone I know in the Ruby community who is deeply into stats and speaks highly of R). I found this book really useful when I was reviewing it because I really was coming from a near-zero background (I last studied statistics in '92).

The sad part is that I didn't have a job where doing this sort of analysis would have helped; with what I'm working on now, that may change.

I liked the book, but unfortunately didn't have anything to which I could apply it. It's great to have my reviewer's copy because now I can go through it again and try to find things to apply it to.

If you're interested in good references for being able to produce `visual stories' I suggest you have a look into the R package `ggplot2' [1].

It's a great way (although a little challenging at first) of being able to produce almost all of the types of plots you're interested in creating. The author of the package also wrote a great book [2] on the package which is worth a read.

A note though, most information on `ggplot2' isn't really aimed at informing you which is the most appropriate plot, merely that a type of plot can be quickly produced.

[1] http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/

[2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387981403?ie=UTF8&tag=...

> Many R books are organized like a statistical text.

Can anybody suggest one of these? I'd like to learn statistics and I find playing with a language is a great way to learn a domain.

This one is free: http://ipsur.org/

I haven't really looked into it though, so read at your own risk!

everybody knows there is no R in action :)

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