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R In A Nutshell by Joseph Adler. Reviewed by Raj Jammalamadaka
This book is a very good introduction to the R programming language. R is a free, general purpose programming language(with a strong support for doing statistics). The language has its idiosyncrasies. For example, the assignment operator is denoted by a reverse arrow (x<-2); this book does a pretty good job of explaining all these in detail. Once you get past these details, you will find that R is a pretty versatile language.
Let us take an example (source: http://www.r-bloggers.com/stock-analysis-using-r/). The following code installs the quantmod package and then displays the stock of Apple along with Bollinger Bands (http://www.bollingerbands.com/).
install.packages("quantmod") # installs the package quantmod
library(quantmod) # loads the package
getSymbols("AAPL") # load Apple's data
chartSeries(AAPL) # Create financial charts
addBBands() # Add the Bollinger Bands.
The graph below was created using the steps above.
One of the best parts of R is huge support of libraries for doing commercial grade statistics and the plots/graphs produced by R are of high quality.
Though I didn't get a chance to try it out, there is a package called RPy which is a Python interface to the R programming language. More details can be found here: http://rpy.sourceforge.net/
If you are mathematically inclined, definitely check this book out. Once you learn R, you can use it anywhere/anytime without ever paying a license fee.
Baypiggies Meeting September 23rd,2010
