The Art of R Programming: A Tour of Statistical Software Design Paperback – Illustrated, October 15, 2011

Many R books tells you how you can use packages or how you handle stats. But, this book has a very different approach, in that it tells you more things about R from programming points of view. I was not trained as a programmer before. Therefore, this book tells me more interesting things about R. If you look for a how-to book, this is to the one. But if you really want to know what R is. This is the best book. I really like it.

他の本とは違い、言語仕様よりの内容に確かになっています。こういう風に使えるよとか、Tips集ではありません。extended exampleでは一歩踏み込んだ内容があるのも確かです。でもいささか言葉で説明する、しようとするきらいがあります。英語は結構平易で問題ありませんが、日本語版も出版されました。日本語版のほうを読んだほうがいいかも。

I think the author (who also was directly involved in the development of R) does a terrible job at explaining all the inner working of the programming language. Examples are often confusing and without any practical implications and sometimes just way too verbose.Part of the problem is definitely the R language, which has been praised in the years for some unknown reason, but if you need to start learning language, beware this is not the book for you.