With all due respect to the great book -- of which I own 2 copies I bought new -- it's not an "O'Reilly Programming in <X>" book. The idea of a programming book like that is to thoroughly treat the language from a programmer's standpoint, in a fairly standard way, such as Ruby or Python.
As I'm learning more of statistics with R, I prefer to do it with the book by Crawley. Looks like most of R books are written by statisticians who became programmers, not the other way. Through all those years I periodically follow R, I forget its programming spirit in between, and there's no "Programming ..." book to help. Statistics is hard to forget once you master it; syntax sugar melts away... "Programming with Data" is the closest to an O'Reilly, but more advanced and esoteric than that. Since R became a bona fide Open Source language with CRAN and all, an O'Reilly book by a [Python and Ruby] programmer-turn-statistician is long overdue! If it systematically compares R with Ruby and Python, its closest Open Source cousins, it would help even more. RPy and RRb are there to help, too. Just my $0.01... Cheers, Alexy On Nov 7, 2007, at 7:46 PM, Bert Gunter wrote: >>> (Will someone here please write an O'Reilly's "Programming in >>> R"? :) > > Someone already has ... see Venable and Ripley's S PROGRAMMING. > > **However** R is more than a general purpose programming language: > it is a > programming language specifically designed for data analysis -- > including > statistical graphics -- and statistics. So, IMHO anyway, it's really > impossible to discuss it without reference to the data structures and > procedures underlying such tasks. Because it is targeted to do > those sorts > of things well, it may handle poorly some things that general purpose > languages do well (minimizing storage with the use of references, for > example). > > My own experience is that one appreciates the power and beauty of the > language and the wisdom of the designers the more one uses it in real > applications. But I am not a computer scientist and have only a > limited > exposure to standard CS concepts and algorithms, to say nothing of > "real" > programming experience. So just my $.02. > > Best regards, > > Bert Gunter > Genentech Nonclinical Statistics > ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
