At 950 pages The R Book is arguably the most comprehensive introductory R book available. As the title suggests, it is not only a ‘statistics with R’ book, even though statistical analysis forms a large part of the content. The book covers the classical statistical tests, generalized linear models, mixed models, generalized additive models, tree models, time series analysis, spatial statistics and survival analysis. The chapter on multivariate statistics is less comprehensive than others and, in general, the more advanced the topic, or the less commonly used, the lighter the treatment that it receives. The basics of data manipulation in R are explained in detail and a very useful chapter on importing data is included. Two other noteworthy topics covered are the general mathematical abilities of R (differential equations, optimization, matrix operations, etc.), and how to perform simple simulations. A first-year undergraduate course in statistics and mathematics is necessary to appreciate fully the contents; however, the book is certainly suitable for scientists and others looking for a practical introduction to statistical modelling and R.

The book reads well from cover to cover, but it is also sufficiently cross-referenced and organized to be used as a reference book. There is also a final chapter (which is almost an appendix) on changing the look of graphics, which provides all the information for producing plots largely in one place. There is some overlap with Crawley’s previous books on R (Crawley, 2005) and S-PLUS (Crawley, 2002), but the non-statistical material is largely new, and an attempt has been made to provide different examples.

One quibble is that it is slightly Windows centric, and attention might have been drawn to graphical user interfaces or script editors that are available. Nevertheless, this is an excellent introduction to R; it is clearly written, explains the basics well and provides numerous examples. I would recommend it to someone with a strong statistics background who is interested in learning about both statistical modelling and R. Those with a quantitative background might find it slow paced.

References

Crawley
,
M. J.
(
2002
)
Statistical Computing: an Introduction to Data Analysis using S-Plus
.
Chichester
:
Wiley
.

Crawley
,
M. J.
(
2005
)
Statistics: an Introduction using R
.
Chichester
:
Wiley
.

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