Book Review: The Art of R Programming
Matteo Maria Pelagatti · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2012
The language R has become the statistician’s gold standard for data analysis and programming and it is gaining popularity also among econometricians. The main reasons for this popularity are to be found in its being open-source and extremely rich of contributed packages (3686 in the Comprehensive R Archive Network or CRAN). When econometricians try to switch to R from languages such as Gauss, Ox, Matlab or Stata, they are usually upset by some peculiarities of R that give a first chaotic impression of the software. These peculiarities turn out to be good grounds to use R maybe in combination with one of the aforementioned languages. For this reason, if one decides to switch to R, my suggestion is that (s)he should support this process with a good book such as Matloff’s The Art of R Programming. Norman Matloff is certainly in a good position for writing a book about a statistics-oriented programming language, indeed he is a professor of computer science and a former professor of statistics at the University of California, Davis, and his expertise in debugging and parallel computing made him cover these two