There are by now a very large number of introductions to R -- and I have read with profit those by Dalgaard, Verzani, Braun, Faraway, Maindonald, John Fox and Venables and Ripley -- but this is the one I would most strongly recommend. The writing is clear, the examples well-chosen, and the end-of-chapter exercises simply excellent. The only way to learn a computer language is to use it, and the exercises make some of the initially confusing quirks of R crystal clear. One of the strongest features of the book is its emphasis on dealing with messy data sets -- after a little real-world experience, one learns that all real-world data sets are messy, and this will prepare the student for that unfortunate fact better than any other introduction to any statistical package that I'm aware of.



A previous review had concluded "Don't recommend this book to any student" on the grounds that its presentation of the Central Limit Theorem does not give a sufficiently rigorous proof. The reviewer must have missed the introduction which states that previous courses in statistics and calculus are not prerequisite; no introductory stats book designed for non-mathematics majors is likely to satisfy that reviewer. Those in search of a way to learn R for data analysis can do no better than to begin with this one.