Ebook: A Beginner's Guide to R

Based on their extensive experience with teaching R and statistics to applied scientists, the authors provide a beginner's guide to R. To avoid the difficulty of teaching R and statistics at the same time, statistical methods are kept to a minimum. The text covers how to download and install R, import and manage data, elementary plotting, an introduction to functions, advanced plotting, and common beginner mistakes. This book contains everything you need to know to get started with R.

"Its biggest advantage is that it aims only to teach R...It organizes R commands very efficiently, with much teaching guidance included. I would describe this book as being handy--it's the kind of book that you want to keep in your jacket pocket or backpack all the time, ready for use, like a Swiss Army knife." (Loveday Conquest, University of Washington)

"Whilst several books focus on learning statistics in R..., the authors of this book fill a gap in the market by focusing on learning R whilst almost completely avoiding any statistical jargon...The fact that the authors have very extensive experience of teaching R to absolute beginners shines throughout." (Mark Mainwaring, Lancaster University)
"Exactly what is needed...This is great, nice work. I love the ecological/biological examples; they will be an enormous help." (Andrew J. Tyne, University of Nebraska-Lincoln)

Alain F. Zuur is senior statistician and director of Highland Statistics Ltd., a statistical consultancy company based in the UK. He has taught statistics to more than 5000 ecologists. He is honorary research fellow in the School of Biological Sciences, Oceanlab, at the University of Aberdeen, UK.
Elena N. Ieno is senior marine biologist and co-director at Highland Statistics Ltd. She has been involved in guiding PhD students on the design and analysis of ecological data. She is honorary research fellow in the School of Biological Sciences, Oceanlab, at the University of Aberdeen, UK.

Erik H.W.G. Meesters is a researcher at the Dutch Institute for Marine Resources and Ecosystem Studies (IMARES). He specializes in coral reef ecology and applied statistics and conducts research on North Sea benthos and seal ecology.

---

This book is frustrating to say the least. It just brushes certain topics, leaving out valuable information - that could have easily been included. For example the topic of passing a dataframe to a sapply or lapply is touched but the why, how, when,... etc are never explained. When reading this or many other sections in this book you cannot help but feel there is a lot of important information regarding these topics you simply still don't know about. Even for a Beginners Guide it leaves out far too much information to be really useful. Some parts might be quite good but the holes in the information this book presents are simply too glaringly huge - if you're looking for a good primer for R, better look somewhere else.