42 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the best books on R, January 9, 2010
This review is from: A Handbook of Statistical Analyses Using R, Second Edition (Paperback)
I have never formally studied any statistical programming language or taken any advanced statistics courses, but I have been self-teaching myself statistics and R. In a nutshell, this book helped me to improve my R skills substantially. Initially I was using online R documentation alone, and the learning went somewhat slowly. This was the first book that I actually purchased on R, and it really is useful. This is fundamentally a book on the use of R rather than on statistical theory.
The book starts with a couple of brief chapters on the R language and basic statistics, but most of the book is concerned with more advanced statistical topics such as principal component analysis, meta-analysis, clustering, and other topics. Each chapter is devoted to a particular statistical technique with an explanation of why you would use that method and brief mathematical background. However, the chapters are mostly devoted to using R to solve example problems. The author uses good examples with educational R code. He does not simply state that a particular command can do something. Rather, he starts from scratch with each example, first by showing the data, then showing the R code to clean it up if needed. He then shows the R code to perform the statistical analysis diagnostics on the solutions.
If you know absolutely no R and no statistics, then this book will not be much use. However, if you know a little R and have grasp of the fundamental principles of statistics (basic probability, parametric vs non-parametric methods, chi-square, t-test, etc...) then this book can improve your R skills tremendously.
A word of caution, however, is that I would not use this book (or any R book for that matter) alone. Additionally, if you do not know the basic logic behind the advanced statistical methods in this book, then you may find that you have to go elsewhere to learn that material. I still go to the internet constantly and when necessary refer to other statistical texts unrelated to R (including one written by Everitt).
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6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Second Edition is even better!, December 26, 2009
This review is from: A Handbook of Statistical Analyses Using R, Second Edition (Paperback)
I had used the 1st edition and I find the 2nd edition even better. It is a useful book for Statisticians who like to work in R. It introduces the reader to most of the useful advanced techniques.
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book to get started., February 6, 2011
This review is from: A Handbook of Statistical Analyses Using R, Second Edition (Paperback)
Great book for the advanced or the beginner. All the examples worked and were easy to use in other scenario.
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