Norman Matloff

Read this after learning the tidyverse because I wanted to understand base R. To that end, the first twelve or so chapters deliver a thorough overview. The later chapters I suspect are woefully out of date. The coding style is awful, however. I understand print imposes limitations but there were many abbreviated variable and function names that I had to stop and parse what they could mean. I also wasn't able to track down all example source code and data, only some of which appeared to be show more available on the author's website. show less

Great book for thinking in R. I'm not sure I would recommend it as your first source of information on how to use R unless you have a solid background in programming and statistics already. Definitely get your hands on this book once you've gotten a start and need to use R in a way that exploits its advantages and idiosyncrasies.

This book is a quick introduction into debugging with mainly GDB, but also a bit of DDD, and Eclipse.

On the plus side, it is easy and fast to read, and it is clearly written. However, this is also no wonder since the topic is treated in a very superficial way. A deeper understanding of the debugging process (like, for example, it can be found in Eli Bendersky's blog article series "How debuggers work", http://eli.thegreenplace.net/programs-and-code/how-debuggers-work/) is not conveyed in the show more book.

The book focuses on terminal based techniques and small-scale projects. Although I have a lot sympathy for the Unix-Terminal interface, I doubt that the techniques taught are efficiently applicable to larger-projects.

Also, I found the style somewhat annoying at times. For example, the authors take some piece of code and consciously delete some line to make up a debugging example (which so far is fine; one might even say: necessary) and then when they arrive at bug they write: "Yeah, you found the bug!". Occasionally, I had the feeling as if a grandpa (the authors) is talking to his grandchild (the reader).

Parts of chapter 6 and the whole chapter 7 have nothing/little to do with debugging, and the only reason that these parts seem to be included in the book seems to be the passion of the authors (well, at least one of them). show less

This book IMHO is an excellent starting point for learning R. I'm finding it really useful for beginners like me to learn this new programming language. The book is comprehensive and well-illustrated.

The initial chapters talk about the foundation concepts like vectors and matrices. The examples are simple enough to start with, while the author leaves some room for self-experimentation. The latter chapters describe the advanced capabilities like graphics, debugging and performance show more tuning.

Needless to say, I'll require a lot of practice to get comfortable thinking in R terms, but this book definitely laid the stepping stone for me. show less