Physical books of “The R Inferno” and “S Poetry”

January 12, 2012

Hardcopy versions of both The R Inferno and S Poetry are now available for sale.

Physical economy

Buy The R Inferno (the version dated 2011 April 30)

 

Buy S Poetry

Discount

The publisher, Lulu, has a coupon for a 25% discount off purchases (up to a maximum of $50) that is good until the end of January (US west coast time).  The code is:

LULUBOOKUK305

One more restriction is that purchases need to be in US dollars, euros or GB pounds.  I’m reasonably sure that it applies to books other than mine, but that isn’t entirely clear.

Real economy

The freely available pdf versions are still where they have always been (and there is every intention that they will remain there):

The R Inferno for free

S Poetry for free

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The R Inferno

Solve your R problems

S Poetry

S Poetry is from last century, and — in my opinion — is showing its age.  However, at least a few people still seem to like it.  So what do I know?

It was written with S-PLUS.  R was at most a toddler at the time.  Much of the code runs in R as intended.

Probably the best thing in it (both now and when first written) is the glossary.  Pretty much all of the words translate from S to R exactly.

Another thing that is still (surprisingly) useful is the chapter on higher dimensional arrays.  There hasn’t been much written about that for R as far as I know.  Correct me if I’m wrong.

Most of the code is pretty much just toys.  The genopt function, which is a simple but effective genetic algorithm, is also a toy — but  a useful toy.  The code to source it into R is genopt.R.

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