I have been using R for about 5 years and for the last 2 years have I been using it regularly. This book might have helped at the early stages of learning R, but at the moment I have learned not to trust this text. I am now seeing questions on the r-help mailing list related to the disorganization that others have commented upon.



The problems start early. For Windows users he uses doubled backslashes without explaining why these are needed or the alternative. He gets the distinction between the two indexing operators wrong when he states that one does not use "[" with lists (and fails to note that dataframes are in point of fact lists.). After starting with the R concept of vectors, the author introduces functions which have list arguments before even describing either lists or the list() function. I could go on and on. Going much further on to the section on count data he compares a dataset to the theoretic Poisson distribution noting that the counts at the low and the high ranges are larger than expected, calling this "highly aggregated", whereas most statisticians would call this over-dispersed. In the next paragraph he makes the opposite statement but then says that the overly dispersed data "shows randomness". I was further bother by his frequent use of the dangerous practice of using attach and the confusing practice of naming objects using names that were also function names such as "exp" and "data". I get the sense that the R News reviewer gave up noting errors and decided instead to move quickly on to recommending "Modern Applied Statistics" by Venables and Ripley. I would also suggest Harrell's "Regression Modeling Strategies".



People sometimes complain that the R documentation in the help pages is difficult, but in my experience the R help pages are far more precise than Crawley's versions of R. I would avoid this book due to a) its disorganization, b) its misleading advice regarding R syntax, and c) its statistical errors. It probably has some value for its large number of worked examples but there are much better books available.

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