[R] Another newbie book recommandation question

[Zembower, Kevin]

I hope this question is sufficiently different from the other requests
for book recommendations that it's not repetitious. If not, I apologize
in advance.

I'm curious what standard reference books working statisticians, or
biostatisticians, have within easy reach of their desk. I'm a computer
systems administrator, and have a two-foot bookshelf directory under my
monitor that contains 13 paperback manuals that I refer to frequently,
some once or twice a day. Are there standard reference works for
statisticians that are used the same way? From reading this list, I'm
guessing that one might be W. N. Venables and B. D. Ripley (2002),
"Modern Applied Statistics with S. Fourth Edition", Springer, ISBN
0-387-95457-0. However, I'm not limiting this to books pertaining to R.

On the other hand, maybe Google and other on-line sources, as well as
interactive programs like R that can spit out numbers previously looked
up in tables, have completely replaced the need for reference books. Is
this the case today?

I'm particularly interested in reference books that may be helpful in my
organization's work. We typically deal with datasets from international
Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) similar to those available at
http://www.measuredhs.com/aboutsurveys/search/search_survey_main.cfm?Srv
yTp=type&listtypes=1. These typically contain 10,000+ respondents and
can have up to 800 fields. We currently analyze these datasets using
Stata.

Thanks for taking the time to think about and respond to this question.
I'll summarize the answers in a later post for the archive.

-Kevin

Kevin Zembower
Internet Services Group manager
Center for Communication Programs
Bloomberg School of Public Health
Johns Hopkins University
111 Market Place, Suite 310
Baltimore, Maryland  21202
410-659-6139