[R] Crawley's book on S-Plus and one strangeness

[ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk]

On Mon, 2 Dec 2002, Matej Cepl wrote:

> I have got to my hands an excellent book by Michael J. Crawley
> ``Statistical Computing: An Introduction to Data Analysis using
> S-Plus'' (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, ISBN 0-471-56040-5). Its beauty
> for me is in the fact, that it is more of ``An Introduction to
> Data Analysis'' than ``using S-Plus'', but I guess that it may be
> of interest for many others.

> Most of the examples in the book are however taken from S-Plus
> and using datasets provided with it. Is there anywhere a copy of
> these datasets available for R?

They are not in S-PLUS.  They are Crawley's own, but he does not
say where they are.  Recently I managed to find them via the publisher's
web site, which links to

http://www.bio.ic.ac.uk/research/mjcraw/statcomp/

> And one small question aside: I was very much surprised (in this
> book as well as on this list) how many times people use
> sqrt(var(x)) when what they want to say (IMHO) is sd(x). Is it
> just a macho way to show that I understand more complicated
> things, or is there any real difference between the two?

sd(x) does not exist in S.  There is stdev(x) in more recent versions of
S-PLUS.  You need a better introductory guide!

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595