Yeah, I should have mentioned that - R for Programmers is exactly the kind of thing I'd need, even if it's not useful for my friends and family (largely scientists rather than programmers for whom the legacy of programming language syntax is completely unknown).

Julia looks cool; I think the syntax is meant to look familiar to people who've used Matlab or Octave extensively. I don't do tons of scientific computing, but Julia is on my list of tools to learn.