Chapman and Hall/CRC
360 pages | 114 Color Illus.
Learning a computer language like R can be either frustrating, fun or boring. Having fun requires challenges that wake up the learner’s curiosity but also provide an emotional reward on overcoming them. The book is designed so that it includes smaller and bigger challenges, in what I call playgrounds, in the hope that all readers will enjoy their path to R fluency. Fluency in the use of a language is a skill that is acquired through practice and exploration. Although rarely mentioned separately, fluency in a computer programming language involves both writing and reading. The parallels between natural and computer languages are many but differences are also important. For students and professionals in the biological sciences, humanities and many applied fields, recognizing the parallels between R and natural languages should help them feel at home with R. The approach I use is similar to that of a travel guide, encouraging exploration and describing the available alternatives and how to reach them. The intention is to guide the reader through the R landscape of 2020 and beyond.
What will you find in this book?
What makes this book different to others?
1. R: the language and the program
2. The R language: “words” and “sentences”
3. The R language: “paragraphs” and “essays”
4. The R language: Statistics
5. The R language: adding new “words”
6. New grammars of data
7. Grammar of graphics
8. Data import and export
9. Bibliography
10. General index
11. Index of R names by category
12. Alphabetic index of R names