I picked up this book with the intention of learning intermediate R. I was past the novice stage of learning the language, but I was still short of learning Advanced R. This book gave me the confidence to read R code more quickly and to understand more nuance in this (fun) language.This book is written by a quant (Wall Street data analyst) who has Masters degrees in both statistics and computer science. I find his statistics section interesting and most helpful. His visualization section is dated as it should use ggplot instead of R’s native plotting techniques.
He analyzes several helpful methods; figuring out those methods constitutes the learning part of the book. The short script (this is a computer cookbook after all) were helpful to extend my knowledge and agility with the language.
The statistics section consists of a plethora of helpful analytical techniques to get what you want out of R. The information in this section is unique to me and as such new/useful. It tells me what techniques to use for certain types of data (e.g., normal vs. non-normal). Short of a statistics textbook, that’s all you can ask for from a computer script cookbook.
So this book served its purpose well. I would not classify it as essential R reading, however. There are other texts which are more important. Some of the scripts are obvious, but this book provided good reading while I was eating lunch for a couple of weeks.