Summary: [R] Wanted: online Introduction to R

[Ben Bolker]

http://math.jpl.nasa.gov/nr/

 This also gives a link to a rebuttal (http://www.nr.com/bug-rebutt.html)
[which addresses the issue of bugs but not of questionable/inefficient
methods].

  I looked recently at the web site given below, and it appears that NR's
licensing policy is less ridiculous than it used to be: it used to be
"one-CPU", now it's "one-screen", which is still a little bit weird (and
grating given that so much of their code is implementations of other
people's algorithms in the public domain, and that---if they had even a
half-decent contract with their publisher---they've made lots of
(well-deserved) money from the book) but I can see what they're trying to
do.

On 24 Nov 1999, Peter Dalgaard BSA wrote:

> Clive Jenkins <clive.jenkins at clara.net> writes:
> 
> > An excellent on-line book for the more advanced reader, especially
> > chapters 14 and 15 that deal with Statistics and Data Modeling:
> > "Numerical Recipes in C: the Art of Scientific Computing" (ISBN
> > 0-521-43108-5) Copyright (C) 1988-1992 by Cambridge University Press. A
> > Fortran version is also available, and both exist in PostScript and PDF.
> > http://www.ulib.org/webRoot/Books/Numerical_Recipes/
> 
> Um, not to put too fine a point on it: That is not a book I'd
> recommend, and particularly not for the statistics sections. It's a
> reasonable introductory text to numerical analysis subjects, but
> according to people who really know the stuff, it is not to be trusted
> in the details (there's an online reference to the criticism, but I
> can't remember it offhand), and their software licencing is.... (don't
> get me started!)
> 
> 

-- 
--------------------------------------------
Ben Bolker                                  bolker at zoo.ufl.edu
Zoology Department, University of Florida   http://www.zoo.ufl.edu/bolker
318 Carr Hall/Box 118525                    tel: (352) 392-5697
Gainesville, FL 32611-8525                  fax: (352) 392-3704

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