44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Very Practical -- Saved me tons of time!!!, March 29, 2011
I'd give this book ten stars if I could. I bought one copy for the office and one for my house. This guy has the ability to write simply and with the mind set of people who are busy and want to get results right away. Of course we'd all love to be leisurely scholars and plow through theory and practice but most of us just need to get things done. A good example is the way he treats ARIMA. He warns you about using auto.arima but does not hide it from you because it is "dangerous." The book is full of tips, well organized and is oriented towards beginners, though it gets into depth. So many of the R books I've read absolutely pound you with up front details, some of which relate to obscure concerns, rather than starting with a task. For example, on page 199 he writes "Problem -- you want to count the relative frequency of certain observations in your sample" Next is "Solution" -- and he explains just the minimum needed to do that job. Some of the tips are just simple time savers, such as the function head(dataframe) to show a few of the dataframe rows at the start and tail(dataframe) to show a few at the end. Finally .... I don't know this writer personally, but I hope he keeps on writing because it is a craft he has thoroughly absorbed somewhere along the line. Bill Yarberry, Houston, TX
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Required reference for working in R, April 6, 2011
The R Cookbook should be on your bookshelf if you work with R.
The book is as self-described, a collection of tasks and how to accomplish those tasks in R (recipes). This is not a tutorial on the language, but is definitely recommended for novices. One of the most frustrating aspects of R for the beginner is to know what manipulations you require for a dataset, but to be clueless as to how to perform those steps in R; this book can help close that gap.
For intermediate users, it can serve as a reference. I'll often use this to jog my memory as to how a particular technique is applied, e.g., run a function on each row of a dataframe. Since the book has been available on the O'Reilly Safari system for several months, it's become one of my most-used options for R info.
Technically the book appears to be accurate, with the recipes I've used functioning well. Caveat, I have not tested any of the higher-end statistical recipes, as they aren't required in my work.
In summary, this should be one of the first books purchased when building an R library.
Disclaimer, I received access from O'Reilly Publishing to an electronic copy of this book for purposes of review.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
best intro to R I've found, May 25, 2011
I'm a long time Matlab user, but have been using R for a couple months now. Still on the fence on their relative merits (they're different, let me say), but it's been interesting. I had the help of friends, but this book got me going. I bought probably 10 books, and this is far and away the best place to start. Nice combination of keeping it simple and still giving you a sense of the logic of the software. What it doesn't have is details about specific things (graphics, for example), but it gets you close enough that you can usually figure the rest out for yourself. Great book, well written, good coverage of topics -- at least for my use (analysis of international macroeconomic data).
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