Advanced R

An Essential Reference for Intermediate and Advanced R Programmers

Advanced R presents useful tools and techniques for attacking many types of R programming problems, helping you avoid mistakes and dead ends. With more than ten years of experience programming in R, the author illustrates the elegance, beauty, and flexibility at the heart of R.

The book develops the necessary skills to produce quality code that can be used in a variety of circumstances. You will learn:

• The fundamentals of R, including standard data types and functions
• Functional programming as a useful framework for solving wide classes of problems
• The positives and negatives of metaprogramming
• How to write fast, memory-efficient code

This book not only helps current R users become R programmers but also shows existing programmers what’s special about R. Intermediate R programmers can dive deeper into R and learn new strategies for solving diverse problems while programmers from other languages can learn the details of R and understand why R works the way it does.

"The book is aimed both at the veteran R user who wants to use the language to its full capabilities, and to the engineer who is entering R with experience in other languages. To either audience it is an invaluable, and irreplaceable, resource...Among the treasures of the book is the introduction of several packages, many of them authored by Wickham, which will help experienced users get more out of the language." (Journal of the American Statistical Association)

"The material is technically correct ... clearly explained and carefully presented. The author has become one of the foremost authorities on this topic and is well known and appreciated throughout the entire R community. This is the great strength of the book and the primary reason it deserves to be published. It addresses a topic where there is already a growing number of books, but few have the depth, the technical accuracy, and the authority of this one."
―Bill Venables, CSIRO

"Technically outstanding ... Enthusiastically recommended."
―Vince Carey, Channing Division of Network Medicine, Harvard Medical School

"In Part IV of Advanced R, the exposition is very good in that every term and concept seems to be defined and explained well, with examples to illustrate main concepts. For any reader who is sufficiently advanced to want to read Part IV, it is clear and surprisingly easy to read. There is plenty of good general advice in these chapters on programming, profiling, optimizing code, etc. that would be applicable for other programming languages. The statements and examples in these chapters seem to be quite accurate and very clear. It is nice to use a book with examples at every step."
―Maria Rizzo, Bowling Green State University