[chubot]

I'd recommend Hadley Wickam's papers: http://vita.had.co.nz/

He is the prolific author of many R packages, which are more like little languages than libraries. His papers are both philosophical and practical, and informed by writing a huge amount of code.

The first one on that page is really good, and along with another paper of his got me explicitly thinking of organize my data in R using the relational model (a thing people with computer science backgrounds will know well).

It made me realize that R is actually a better SQL. It's a language for tables, or an algebra of tables.