I'm looking for a book for someone completely ignorant of statistics
who wishes to learn both statistics and R. I've found three
possibilities, one by Verzani ("Using R for Introductory Statistics"),
one by Crawley ("Statistics: An Introduction using R"), and one by
Dalgaard ("Introductory Statistics with R"). Do these books have
different emphases, perspectives, or strengths? Should I just pick
one at random and buy it?
Thanks,
--Paul
I know you asked for a comparison (which I can't provide) but on an absolute
scale for a beginner it'd be hard to beat Dalgaard ("Introductory
Statistics
with R"). It assumes nothing, and teaches you statistics in a lucid
no-nonsense way AND teaches you R along the way as a mechanism for
implementing the statistical thinking you've acquired.
Charles Annis, P.E.
Charles.Annis at StatisticalEngineering.com
phone: 561-352-9699
eFax: 614-455-3265
http://www.StatisticalEngineering.com
-----Original Message-----
From: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch
[mailto:r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch] On Behalf Of Paul Lynch
Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2007 6:35 PM
To: r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: [R] R book advice
I'm looking for a book for someone completely ignorant of statistics
who wishes to learn both statistics and R. I've found three
possibilities, one by Verzani ("Using R for Introductory Statistics"),
one by Crawley ("Statistics: An Introduction using R"), and one by
Dalgaard ("Introductory Statistics with R"). Do these books have
different emphases, perspectives, or strengths? Should I just pick
one at random and buy it?
Thanks,
--Paul
______________________________________________
R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
Hi Paul,
All three are excellent choices, so you won't go wrong with random
choice. Here is your first R lesson:
RBooks <- c("Verzani", "Crawley", "Dalgaard")
sample(RBooks, 1)
Seriously, I expect you will end up with all three. Here are my
mini-reviews (in order of publication)
Peter Dalgaard's book came out just before I first discovered R in the
winter of 2002. It was my intro to R and a good stats refresher.
Charles' assessment correct. At only ~250 pages, it is not at all
intimidating, however Peter does build up to some intermediate topics
like logistic regression and survival analysis. My copy is now
somewhat tattered & I should get a replacement!
John Verzani had, and still has, a preliminary version of his book on
CRAN: http://cran.cnr.berkeley.edu/doc/contrib/Verzani-SimpleR.pdf so
I was very excited when it come out in hard copy - much expanded - as
"Using R." He has more visualization examples - which I like. I do
wish John would have used "<-" instead of "=" for
assignment. It's
important to start "thinking in R" - "=" drags me back to my
FORTRAN
days.
Being a mid-western American, I love Michael Crawley's British view of
the world! He really forces you to get an intuitive feel for what is
going on. Also good visualization emphasis. My only criticism is he
suggests using Word to save your work. You should really use a more
serious text editor/environment. I generally use JGR today, having
moved from RWinEdt and TextPad. The Linux folks love ESS, but that is
how they were brought up.
On 2/15/07, Paul Lynch <plynchnlm at gmail.com>
wrote:> I'm looking for a book for someone completely ignorant of statistics
> who wishes to learn both statistics and R. I've found three
> possibilities, one by Verzani ("Using R for Introductory
Statistics"),
> one by Crawley ("Statistics: An Introduction using R"), and one
by
> Dalgaard ("Introductory Statistics with R"). Do these books have
> different emphases, perspectives, or strengths? Should I just pick
> one at random and buy it?
>
> Thanks,
> --Paul
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guide
http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
--
HTH,
Jim Porzak
Loyalty Matrix Inc.
San Francisco, CA
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimporzak
Dear Paul, You might want to add Everitt & Hothorn's "A Handbook of Statistical Analyses Using R". If I had to recommend just one book it'd be this one. My own (i.e., highly subjective) suggestion, if you can afford two books, would be to first go through Dalgaard's and then through Everitt & Hothorn's. I do not have a direct experience with Verzani's, but I've heard great things about it. I think a pdf of a preliminary version is available from the R page. Regarding Crawley's ... well, I find some/many of his comments and suggestions unorthodox (my experience is with his "Statistical Computing: An Introduction to Data Analysis using S-Plus", a book I would not recommend to a novice). HTH, R. On 2/16/07, Paul Lynch <plynchnlm at gmail.com> wrote:> I'm looking for a book for someone completely ignorant of statistics > who wishes to learn both statistics and R. I've found three > possibilities, one by Verzani ("Using R for Introductory Statistics"), > one by Crawley ("Statistics: An Introduction using R"), and one by > Dalgaard ("Introductory Statistics with R"). Do these books have > different emphases, perspectives, or strengths? Should I just pick > one at random and buy it? > > Thanks, > --Paul > > ______________________________________________ > R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. >-- Ramon Diaz-Uriarte Statistical Computing Team Structural Biology and Biocomputing Programme Spanish National Cancer Centre (CNIO) http://ligarto.org/rdiaz
Dear list, I want to plot a "3 dimensional histogram" and I am looking for a funktion to do so. I have a dataframe with the following information: <1 <0.5 <0 <-0.5 <-1 "a" 13 11 6 2 1 "b" 9 8 6 5 3 "c" 5 4 3 2 1 "d" 8 4 3 1 0 The first column is the name, the other columns are the amounts under a certain threshold. First row are the thresholds. Can anybody help me ? Gunther