A First Course in Statistical
Programming with R by Duncan J.
Murdoch
Great For Beginners, Or Casual Users
This is the only introduction youll need to start programming in R, the
open-source language that is free to download, and lets you adapt the
source code for your own requirements. Co-written by one of the R Core
Development Team, and by an established R author, this book comes with
real R code that complies with the standards of the language. Unlike other
introductory books on the ground-breaking R system, this book
emphasizes programming, including the principles that apply to most
computing languages, and techniques used to develop more complex
projects. Learning the language is made easier by the frequent exercises
and end-of-chapter reviews that help you progress confidently through the
book. Solutions, datasets and any errata will be available from the books
web site. The many examples, all from real applications, make it
particularly useful for anyone working in practical data analysis.

Personal Review: A First Course in Statistical Programming
with R by Duncan J. Murdoch
A lot of people have need of means to manipulate and chart data. Some
of them are professionals from various fields, some of them are students,
some of them are users of computers who have outgrown the meager
capabilities of Excel or OpenOffice's Calc, or simply can't stand the
spreadsheet model any longer. R is a good solution to these needs.
Recognize that R is not just a programming language, not in the sense of
Python or Ruby or C. It is a universe. In addition to the capability in the
base language, the availability of hundreds of sophisticated packages
extends its capability to all kinds of terrains, from the traditional and
statistical, to GIS, spatial, image-based, and nearly research edges.
Mastery of those packages would take a lifetime. There are new ones
every month.
But these packages are not what the average user needs or wants. What
the average user needs or wants is a gentle introduction, how to install R,
how to use it for common things, getting data in and out, some graphs,
some basic statistical notions. Alas, until recently, most R books were
sophisticated presentations, ones giving terse, in depth illustrations of R's
uses for statistics and analysis. It was difficult to find discussions on the
core language, and most of those went back to S+, and Chambers.
Admittedly, there are detailed discussions of these as PDF documents with
installations, but these may not be reachable by the casual user.
Fortunately, today we have at one end of the beginners' path, the
Venables and Smith AN INTRODUCTION TO R. That text is also available
online, and was part of some installations of R, at least on Windows. At
the other end of the beginners' path is Rizzo's STATISTICAL
COMPUTING WITH R, a book on introductory statistics using R for
illustration. And, in the middle of the path, there's this text, Braun and
Murdoch's A FIRST COURSE. It's fine. It won't let you down. You won't
learn how to do projection pursuit regression with R from it. But, then,
many people don't need that.
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