R in Action [Paperback]

Robert Kabacoff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 24, 2011

Summary

R in Action is the first book to present both the R system and the use cases that make it such a compelling package for business developers. The book begins by introducing the R language, including the development environment. Focusing on practical solutions, the book also offers a crash course in practical statistics and covers elegant methods for dealing with messy and incomplete data using features of R.

About the Technology

R is a powerful language for statistical computing and graphics that can handle virtually any data-crunching task. It runs on all important platforms and provides thousands of useful specialized modules and utilities. This makes R a great way to get meaningful information from mountains of raw data.

About the Book

R in Action is a language tutorial focused on practical problems. It presents useful statistics examples and includes elegant methods for handling messy, incomplete, and non-normal data that are difficult to analyze using traditional methods. And statistical analysis is only part of the story. You'll also master R's extensive graphical capabilities for exploring and presenting data visually.

Purchase of the print book comes with an offer of a free PDF, ePub, and Kindle eBook from Manning. Also available is all code from the book.

What's Inside

• Practical data analysis, step by step
• Interfacing R with other software
• Using R to visualize data
• Over 130 graphs
• Eight reference appendixes

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Table of Contents

Part I Getting started

1. Introduction to R
2. Creating a dataset
3. Getting started with graphs
4. Basic data management
5. Advanced data management

Part II Basic methods

6. Basic graphs
7. Basic statistics

Part III Intermediate methods

8. Regression
9. Analysis of variance
10. Power analysis
11. Intermediate graphs
12. Re-sampling statistics and bootstrapping

Part IV Advanced methods

13. Generalized linear models
14. Principal components and factor analysis
15. Advanced methods for missing data
16. Advanced graphics

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Rob Kabacoff is a seasoned researcher who specializes in data analysis. He has taught graduate courses in statistical programming and manages the Quick-R website at statmethods.net.

Product Details

• Paperback: 472 pages
• Publisher: Manning Publications; 1 edition (August 24, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1935182390
• ISBN-13: 978-1935182399
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 0.9 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #35,458 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #20 in Books > Computers & Technology > Software > Mathematical & Statistical

More About the Author

Rob Kabacoff is Vice President of Research for MRG, a global organizational development firm based in Portland Maine and Dublin Ireland. He has more than 20 years of experience providing research and statistical consultation to government, academia, and private industry. Prior to joining MRG, Dr. Kabacoff was a professor of psychology at Nova Southeastern University in Florida, where he taught graduate courses in clinical psychology, quantitative methods and statistical programming. He lives in Portland, Maine with his wife Carol Lynn and golden retriever Ella.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 50 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The new standard September 10, 2011

By Dimitri Shvorob

Format:Paperback

I think that "R in Action" is the best "general-purpose" R book on the market. Previously, I would have recommended Joe Adler's "R in Nutshell" as the closest thing to an "R Bible", and Paul Teetor's "R Cookbook" as the beginner-friendly introduction. Now, "R in Action" comes close to giving one the best of both worlds, combining the accessibility of Teetor's book with the wide scope and thoroughness of Adler's. In adversarial terms, "R Cookbook", competing in the introduction-to-R pageant, charms the audience, but loses to "R in Action" on points - while "R in Nutshell", defending its hold on the "intermediate" sector, retains 100% support of multiple special-interest groups (including Machine Learning Alliance, Bioinformatics Computing League and Association for Advancement of Trellis Plots), but loses the median voter. It's a good idea to get two books, anyway, and this one deserves a spot on the list.

PS. Each of the three books splits the material into (a) "R fundamentals", including syntax, data structures and I/O, basic statistics and graphics, and (b) "Specialized statistics", starting from the linear regression. On (b), "R in Action" wins over "R in Nutshell" on depth, and distinguishes itself on (a), by offering valuable advice absent in "R in Nutshell". (Examples include importing data from Excel, SAS or SPSS, reading XML, parsing date strings, using string functions (!), reshaping data frames with "reshape" package, and - #1 on my list - SQL-querying data frames with "sqldf").

PPS. When I say "general-purpose", I primarily mean "not statistical". If you want a book on statistics in R, Michael Crawley's (second edition) is the clear choice.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Best R book I ever read May 30, 2012

By Junyu Lee

Format:Paperback

The reason I picked this book because I read a article in a Chinese R BBS which recomanded this book as the best book for beginner. I checked Amazon reviews, it only had 3.4. Someone even gave it one star. I was glad I didn't take these reviews serously. Just as the saying: one man's food is another man's poison. I found this book was right for me.

First, there is no book which can cover everything of R, even the very common used part. If there is one, it might be the most boring book in the world. Second, the part you use day in day out, might not be the part others use frequently. Third, a lot of stuff, you have to learn when you have a problem to solve. The simple example is, when I started to learn read.table, I have no idea what all these arguments were and how to use them. Later, I had problem, I gradually learned how to use skip, nrows, row.names. There are still a lot, such as check.names, I have never used so far and don't know and don't care. I don't think a book should list all these stuff. That would be super boring.

I had taught myself R using The R Book before I read this one. I found the best of book, it taught you something you could put to use right away. I especially like its statistic part, simple, clear, and staight forward. It covers a lot of stuff usually not covered by most of books. For example, it explains the output of the summary (lm(x~y)) which I wanted to know but felt too embarrassed to ask because I thought everybody knew except me.

This book is right for beginner like me. As I said, if you want to learn how to build a car, how the engine works before you learn how to drive a car, this book is not for you. If you simple want to learn just how to drive plus a little bit maintenance, totally don't care how engine works, this is the right book for you. By the way, The R Book is a really good book for the R part. The statistic part is too complicate for me. Two much engine manufacture stuff.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Includes Topics That Others Skip October 22, 2011

By Robert A. Muenchen

Format:Paperback

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Kabacoff's writing is clear and concise. He covers a wide range of statistics and graphics, including topics that many books skip, such as missing values analysis and interactive graphics. One of the best things about R is the huge number of packages available for it. But which ones are worth investigating? This book covers quite a few packages I have never used before, so even experienced R users will make many useful discoveries reading it. I have no doubt this book will become as popular as his web site, Quick-R (statmethods.net).