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I read it cover to cover (so to speak) about two weeks ago, and although still a work in progress, it is indeed the best written guide to R that I've read to da
by abraxasz 14y ago
I read it cover to cover (so to speak) about two weeks ago, and although still a work in progress, it is indeed the best written guide to R that I've read to date. It appealed to me because it insisted on the functional programming side of R, and explained some of the intricacies and advanced concepts in R. It's pretty dense though and will certainly require a number of re-reads before I internalize all of the material.
One thing I would find very useful is a case study on how to design more complex packages. In particular, I would love to have an executive summary of the inner-working of ggplot2 and/or ddply. In particular, how can I manage to pass formulas as arguments to my functions, how can I achieve the pseudo DSL effect of ggplot2, etc... I know, I could read the source on github, but ggplot2 is pretty big, so a summary would be helpful.
- hadley 14y agoI think as I flush out the functional programming and computing on the language sections, those techniques underlying ggplot2 and plyr should become more obvious. I like the idea of case studies on more complex packages, but I don't know if I can bring myself to try and describe how they work :/ Part of the problem is that I didn't understand the techniques terribly well myself when I wrote ggplot2 and plyr, so they don't have particularly clean implementations.
- disgruntledphd2 14y agoI have to second the usefulness of devtools/wiki. Its wonderfully clear and concise, though it does take some getting one's head around. And I write R every day and have read all of Venables and Ripley (more than once) and R still trips me up quite a lot. I tend to understand the error messages now, which is certainly progress.