Hi Paul, All three are excellent choices, so you won't go wrong with random choice. Here is your first R lesson:
RBooks <- c("Verzani", "Crawley", "Dalgaard") sample(RBooks, 1) Seriously, I expect you will end up with all three. Here are my mini-reviews (in order of publication) Peter Dalgaard's book came out just before I first discovered R in the winter of 2002. It was my intro to R and a good stats refresher. Charles' assessment correct. At only ~250 pages, it is not at all intimidating, however Peter does build up to some intermediate topics like logistic regression and survival analysis. My copy is now somewhat tattered & I should get a replacement! John Verzani had, and still has, a preliminary version of his book on CRAN: http://cran.cnr.berkeley.edu/doc/contrib/Verzani-SimpleR.pdf so I was very excited when it come out in hard copy - much expanded - as "Using R." He has more visualization examples - which I like. I do wish John would have used "<-" instead of "=" for assignment. It's important to start "thinking in R" - "=" drags me back to my FORTRAN days. Being a mid-western American, I love Michael Crawley's British view of the world! He really forces you to get an intuitive feel for what is going on. Also good visualization emphasis. My only criticism is he suggests using Word to save your work. You should really use a more serious text editor/environment. I generally use JGR today, having moved from RWinEdt and TextPad. The Linux folks love ESS, but that is how they were brought up. On 2/15/07, Paul Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm looking for a book for someone completely ignorant of statistics > who wishes to learn both statistics and R. I've found three > possibilities, one by Verzani ("Using R for Introductory Statistics"), > one by Crawley ("Statistics: An Introduction using R"), and one by > Dalgaard ("Introductory Statistics with R"). Do these books have > different emphases, perspectives, or strengths? Should I just pick > one at random and buy it? > > Thanks, > --Paul > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. > -- HTH, Jim Porzak Loyalty Matrix Inc. San Francisco, CA http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimporzak ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.