76 of 80 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
a must for statisticians wanting to learn R, May 11 2008
By Michael R. Chernick "statman31147" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Data Manipulation with R (Paperback)
This book along with Jim Albert's should be read by every statistician that does a lot of statistical computing. Both books help you learn R quickly and apply it to many important problems in research both applied and theoretical. Albert emphasizes applications in Bayesian statistics whereas Spector is teaching how to do data manipulation, things like merging and transposing data sets. These techniques can be easy to do in a language like SAS after a little training but in other programming languages it can be very difficult.
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great little book, Jun 13 2008
By F. Tusell Palomer "F.Tusell" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Data Manipulation with R (Paperback)
This concise 150 page book contains a wealth of information, writen clearly and with many well-chosen examples. I liked it a lot. It covers reading and writing data in/out of the R workspace, including access to databases. The names of other chapters suggest the topics covered: "Dates", "Factors", "Subscripting", "Character manipulation", "Data aggregation", "Reshaping data".
This book will be helpful to any but the most absolutely new to R, and even the seasoned user will find interesting hints and examples. I cannot recommend it enough.
One minor qualm I have is the absence of references. Some topics (for instance, regular expressions) are fairly complex, and well documented elsewhere: a pointer or two would be helpful. Same with, for instance, SQL, which is mentioned and demonstrated briefly.
Another not-so-minor qualm is price. A book of this size from, for instance, Dover classics collection, with similar paper quality and covers, is about a third or fourth of the price. Although this is a new book I find the $54.95 tag (Amazon discounted price is about $44.50) fairly high. But this has nothing to do with the quality of the book, rather it has to do with the Springer pricing policies.
All in all, if you don't mind the price, this is a good buy.
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Start here, Dec 19 2008
By I Teach Typing - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Data Manipulation with R (Paperback)
All too often novices wanting to use R for an analysis never get to the analysis because they can't successfully import, clean-up and restructure their data for the analysis functions. This book prevents those problems by telling you the critical data and file manipulation materials that are usually briefly (and inadequately) covered in stat books. It is a short easy read that will give you the tools to get your data ready to go.
You can see the table of contents and read the other reviews but areas that really shine include: dealing with categorical (named or ordered) factor variables, recoding numeric data into categorical variables, and also making and working with summary tables.
When it comes to data manipulation and clean-up Spector has the best coverage of any book or web FAQ. This book is very expensive for its size but it is worth every cent.