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by ltjohnson 5595 days ago
No, but I can give some suggestions. It would help to know what you want to do.

First of all, you need to decide if you want a language reference, or an application guide, as R books fall into those two categories.

If you have a specific type of work in mind (bio-informatics, data mining, data visualization, ...) I'd say to find a book that focuses on that topic. I haven't looked in a while, but I haven't seen a general R book that I like, anything I suggest there would be guessing on my part.

There are plenty of good references on the web. I'd start by looking at the material available from the R web site:

R's core manuals [1] are typically correct and reasonable to use. The "Introduction to R" guide will get you up to speed fairly well if you already know another programming language. There is also the contributed documentation [2]. I haven't gone through these, so I can't say much about them, or promise that they are up-to-date. I suspect not, as R develops rapidly. The one reference I can recommend highly is "The R Inferno" by Patrick Burns [3]. This is not a starter guide, but something you read after one. It gives excellent advice on avoiding common pitfalls in R.

[1] http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html

[2] http://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html

[3] http://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf

1 comments

Thanks. I do biology with limited amount of data and my needs are very basic. Here is a software I wrote to do sleep analysis in Drosophila: http://www.pysolo.net

So far I could satisfy most of my statistics needs with the function in numpy and scipy but occasionally I need to do something slightly more fancy and R I guess is the way to go.

Possibly. R is really great at doing "fancy" statistical analyses. It's very lousy at doing things like text manipulation. When I have a project that needs some text manipulation on the front end, I frequently use other tools (Python, vi, sed, ...) on the front end to beat text data into a nicer form for R. I couldn't say without knowing more about your project.