Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

There are hundreds of R books, but this is the best one to address the core problem of learning to *program* in R. As reviewer Jason notes, R is used by several audiences with varying needs, but anyone who uses R for long must come to terms with learning to program it. This is the book for that. What Matloff does is to lay out the essentials of the R language (or S, if you prefer) in depth but in a readable fashion, with well-chosen examples that reinforce learning about the language itself (as opposed to focusing on statistics or data analysis). I'm a long-time (12 years) R user, which is my platform for analytics every day, and I have programmed in a variety of languages from C to Perl. I have long missed the fact that there is nothing for R comparable to Kernighan & Ritchie ("K&R", The C Programming Language) or similar programming classics; finally there is. Matloff is not quite as beautiful and elegant as K&R (and to be fair, is not in their position as the language creator) but this book has similar goals and comes reasonably close. I think there are two primary audiences for this book: those who are learning R from a computer science or programming background; and statisticians and others who use the programming language and want a thorough exposition. In my case, for instance, despite having written perhaps 100k lines of R code over the years, there remained areas where I was uneasy (e.g., exactly how do lists relate to data frames). Matloff sets it all straight, in friendly, readable fashion. Even in rudimentary chapters, I learned shortcuts and miscellaneous functions that are quite useful. The examples throughout are more "CS-like" than statistical, which is highly advantageous for this topic. In addition to the tutorial content, it is well-suited as a quick reference. It doesn't aim to be comprehensive from a function point of view (which is almost impossible, and what R Help is for), but it is comprehensive from a programming conceptual point of view. In short, if you program R, and unless you're a member of R-Core, then I believe you'll enjoy this, will learn something, and will refer back to it repeatedly.