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As a programmer, I can enthusiastically endorse this book. R "as a language" is hard to grok when you come to it with the mentality of "a programmer" due to it'
by earino 12y ago
As a programmer, I can enthusiastically endorse this book. R "as a language" is hard to grok when you come to it with the mentality of "a programmer" due to it's history as an interactive environment for data analysis, and an interface to algorithms first, and a programming environment second.
Hadley's book is a solid introduction when you are trying to map concepts from other, more traditional, programming environments to the R way of thinking.
- jghn 12y agoR "as a language" is much easier if you don't come in with the Standard c-ish language blinders on
- earino 12y agothere was a great keynote at this last useR! conference by John Chambers about how R's predecessor, S, was designed as an interface language (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hcpuRB5nGs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hcpuRB5nGs). He discusses how as part of it's fundamental cognitive model, it was there to provide a facile interactive "interface" to best-of-breed algorithms. Very few other programming languages have that pedigree, they were mostly designed to architect systems.