[R] Book on R programming

[Norm Matloff]

ANJAN PURKAYASTHA wrote:

> Most books on R I come across describe running statistical procedures
> in R.
> Any suggestions on a good book that teaches *programming* in R?
> Thanks,
> Anjan

I'm in the midst of writing such a book right now.  It will be published
early next year, by the whimsically named No Starch Press, a subsidiary
of O'Reilly (the "menagenary" series on programming languages and
software).  You've seen the NSP series in bookstores, with the yellow
and black motif.  I published a book on debugging with them last year,
with Peter Salzman.

I just checked with NSP, and they say that I can provide the current
manuscript if anyone is interested.  Just sent me an e-mail message
requesting it. 

That current manuscript is about 75% complete.  Obviously, due to its
incomplete state, it likely has various bugs in the code (though I've
run all the code), missed opportunities (i.e. code that could be written
better if I were to make better use of R constructs), and incorrect
statements.  But hopefully there are not many such cases, and it should
be useful to R programmers, both beginning and experienced.  Needless to
say, I would like to hear of any such cases you find.

A bit on the background I bring to this book project:  My PhD was in
Math at UCLA, with a thesis in probability theory and a lot of work in
applied statistics.  I was a founding member of the Dept. of Statistics
at UC Davis, but later moved to form the Dept. of Computer Science.  My
CS research work has often been statistical in nature.  I'm an R user
going way back to the "blue book" days of S.

Norm Matloff