by Joseph Rickert
What are you reading? – and what are you recommending to friends, colleagues, and students who want to learn something about R programming? A quick search of Amazon will show that there are several new R books proposed for 2016; but of course, new doesn’t necessarily mean better. I fully expect that many new books in all areas of statistics, data science and many other scientific disciplines using R to provide a computational aspect for their exposition will continue to be written for years to come. All of these books will provide windows into learning R for people excited about the particular subject matter. However, so many excellent R based texts have already been published that it will be difficult for these new works to achieve “must buy” status for the R content alone.
Below are my recommendations for good R reads. Some of these books go back a few years, but they continue to hold their value. With the possible exception of books that were based primarily on the S language, good R books don’t become obsolete. Unlike some other computer languages, R evolves mostly through new capabilities added by contributed packages, not through changes to the R core. The fact that the dplyr family of packages may make data wrangling more convenient in many circumstances doesn’t make a book that teaches data manipulation through base R functions any less relevant. In fact, some might argue that new students should be taught the basic functionally first. I am not a militant traditionalist, but it does seem to me that familiarity with the bare bones basics of the language will help newcomers to gain intuition about how R works.
There are three lists below. The first lists my picks for teaching R programming. (Top row in the graphic) The …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com