The Art of R Programming: A Tour of Statistical Software Design
Norman Matloff · 2011
From the Author: Why Use R for Your Statistical Work? As the Cantonese say, yauh peng, yauh leng, which means both inexpensive and beautiful. Why use anything else? R has a number of virtues: It is a public-domain implementation of the widely regarded S statistical language, and the R/S platform is a de facto standard among professional statisticians. It is comparable, and often superior, in power to commercial products in most of the significant senses -- variety of operations available, programmability, graphics, and so on. It is available for the Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. In addition to providing statistical operations, R is a general-purpose programming language, so you can use it to automate analyses and create new functions that extend the existing language features. R includes a library of several thousand user-contributed packages. It incorporates features found in object-oriented and functional programming languages. R is capable of producing beautiful graphics for your presentations, reports or articles.