[R] A Book for SAS, SPSS and R students

[John Kane]

Thank you, an interesting interview and I have used the original pdf version more than once though I tend to use it to think about how convert R to SAS rather than SAS to R.  


--- On Fri, 9/26/08, Ajay ohri <ohri2007 at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Ajay ohri <ohri2007 at gmail.com>
> Subject: [R] A Book for SAS, SPSS and R students
> To: "sas-l" <SAS-L at listserv.uga.edu>, "r-help at r-project.org" <r-help at r-project.org>, "r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch" <r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch>
> Received: Friday, September 26, 2008, 10:14 PM
> Hi List,
> 
> I had the pleasure of taking Dr Bob Muenchen's
> interview for his upcoming
> book R For SAS and SPSS users. He has spent 27 years in
> this field while I
> have spent almost that much on earth.
> 
> So this is more like a fan blog interview. I thought it
> would be of use to
> people curious about R, or even SAS , or SPSS if they have
> not worked on
> either of these packages before.
> 
> Having fought my own battles for cheaper software, or
> trying to learn R by
> kicking the GUI habit,I found this quite useful
> 
> It would of extra interest to people in developing world as
> they effectively
> pay 7 times as much due to economic purchasing parity for
> softwares, even
> though statistical decision making is the area they need
> the most to
> optimize their resources and planning.R is free.
> 
> So here goes, and thanks for your time, and apologies if
> you think this is
> spam. Please send the comments (especially the SAS-L list )
> individually on
> my email.
> 
> Ajay
> 
> http://www.decisionstats.com/?p=599
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Note-*Dr Robert Muenchen (pronounced Min'-chen) is the
> author of the famous
> R for SAS and SPSS users, and his forthcoming book is an
> extensive tutorial
> on anyone wanting to learn either SAS, SPSS ,or R or even
> to migrate from
> one platform to another.In an exclusive interview to
> www.decisionstats.comBob agreed to answer some questions on
> the book ,
> and on students planning
> to enter science careers.*
> 
> 
> 
> *What made you write the R For SAS and SPSS users?*
> 
> *The book-
> <http://www.amazon.com/SAS-SPSS-Users-Statistics-Computing/dp/0387094172/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217456813&sr=8-1>
> *
> 
> A few years ago, all my colleagues seemed to be suddenly
> talking about R.
> Had I tried it? What did I think? Wasn't it amazing? I
> searched around for a
> review and found an article by Patrick Burns, "R
> Relative to Statistics
> Packages" which is posted on the UCLA site (*
> http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/technicalreports/*). That
> article pointed out
> the many advantages of R and in it Burns claimed that
> knowing a standard
> statistics package interfered with learning R. That article
> really got my
> interest up. Pat's article was a rejoinder to
> "Strategically using General
> Purpose Statistics Packages: A Look at Stata, SAS and
> SPSS" by Michael
> Mitchell, then the manager of statistical consulting at
> UCLA (it's at that
> same site). In it he said little about R, other than he had
> "enormous
> difficulties" learning it that he had especially found
> the documentation
> lacking.
> 
> I dove in and started learning R. It was incredibly hard
> work, most of which
> was caused by my expectations of how I thought it ought to
> work. I did have
> a lot to "unlearn" but once I figured a certain
> step out, I could see that
> explaining it to another SAS or SPSS user would be
> relatively easy. I
> started keeping notes on these differences for myself
> initially. I finally
> posted them on the Internet as the first version of *R for
> SAS and SPSS
> Users*. It was only 80 pages and much of its explanation
> was in the form of
> extensive R program comments. I provided 27 example
> programs, each done in
> SAS, SPSS and R. A person could see how they differed,
> topic by topic. When
> a person ran the sections of the R programs and read all
> the comments, he or
> she would learn how R worked.
> 
> A web page counter on that document showed it was getting
> about 10,000 hits
> a month. That translates into about 300 users, paging back
> and forth through
> the document. An editor from Springer emailed me to ask if
> I could make it a
> book. I said it might be 150 pages when I wrote out the
> prose to replace all
> the comments. It turned out to be 480 pages!
> 
> 
> http://www.amazon.com/SAS-SPSS-Users-Statistics-Computing/dp/0387094172/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217456813&sr=8-1
> 
> You can read the rest of the interview here -
> www.decisionstats.com  (which
> is a non commercial non advertising website )
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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