Has anyone run across a good book introducing both the R software and standard statistical analysis methods? I'm trying to learn both and would greatly appreciate any advice!

You might want to look at some of the online resources first, like SimpleR - Using R for Introductory Statistics or Statistics with R.

That being said, here are a couple of decent R books:

*Introductory Statistics with R (Statistics and Computing) by Peter Dalgaard
*A Handbook of Statistical Analyses Using R by Brian Everitt

The former is more introductory (covering basic descriptive statistics and distributions before going to testing and other topics), while the latter jumps straight into ANOVA, regression, density estimation and meta-analysis. If they both assume too much of your statistics background, you might want to first tackle statistics independent of R.

Best of luck.

Message edited by its author, Mar 19, 2009, 8:45pm.

2>

Would the second book you mentioned be a good choice for someone who wants to learn R but who absolutely positively doesn't want to waste money on a book that tries to reteach him statistics?

(I'm a book lover--that's why I'm on LibraryThing--so I'm not looking for a web resource.)

I second Dalgaard for one that tries to cover some stats and is very basic on both fronts.

3> Modern Applied Statistics with S is the one I would suggest for you - but I haven't read the one johnnylogic suggests. (I think I may have read something unrelated by Everitt that was very well written though!)

3> I'm not sure that the Everitt book is particularly apt. R is vast, and I'm just an autodidact, so my pool of recommendations is rather limited. If you have some programming and statistics background, you might want to look for a book on a particular application of R you are interested in, so you may avoid unnecessary introductory material and start learning by doing.

4> Modern Applied Statistics with S looks really good-- I like its coverage.

Thanks. The reviews of Venables/Ripley look good. (I just wish I could be sure that this isn't one of those books that has fallen victim to Springer's practice of selling low-grade digital reprints at the same price as the original book.)

Oooh, that gets on my nerves when Springer does that. I get my expectations up, and then I see one of their books that looks like smashed bugs because of the poor scan/print quality.

I am trying to pick up a little R as well. There's lots of *stuff* online but there's not much to bridge the gap between very basic tutorials and either man pages or intense applications. (This is a problem with almost all software, it seems to me... not to pick on R!)

The Venables and Ripley MASS book is very good, and is pretty widely seen as the standard R (& S / S-Plus) text. I've also looked at the Dalgaard book - it might be better for beginners (both statistics and programming beginners).

Venables and Ripley also have a more advanced book - S Programming - which goes into more detail about using classes, compiled code, environments, and other more programmery topics.

#7: You're right - once you get the basics of the language down, you're pretty much on your own with the man pages.