
Advanced R by Hadley Wickham - sonabinu
http://adv-r.had.co.nz/
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phren0logy
Hadlye Wickham has done some amazing work in R (ggplot2, plyr and dplyr).
Despite R being a bit weird and annoying at times, his packages continue to
make it the most compelling option for data analysis (though Julia is catching
up!).

Thanks, Hadley, for all the hard work.

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shanusmagnus
I was just thinking today that I have very mixed feelings about Hadley,
despite not knowing him -- on the positive side, his works (in my mind)
transform R from a horrific language to a tolerable one, which is an
astounding feat. On the negative side, if he hadn't made such momentous
contributions, maybe people would have abandoned the bloody thing by now and
we'd be using Julia instead.

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hadley
I'll choose to take that as a compliment :p

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zzleeper
Also my feeling. You've been a great inspiration about how to write great and
useful code, but I still feel like the many great features of R (as you said
some time ago, NA handling, data frames, etc.) are sometimes outweighed by the
cons.

Quick question: what would you tell the Julia guys as a recommendation? Even
though they are "competition", you probably have strong feelings about what
features of R _must_ be in any language that aims to replace.

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nothunttroll
As someone that likes lisp, I enjoyed a lot reading this. My first try when
reading about functional programming was to try:
Filter(Negate(is.numeric),c(1,2,"hello","bye")) just to receive something
unexpected, then in freenode someone answered that c cast types to the more
general type, here strings. So I have to begin reading from the beginning
about types.

I think that Hadley can gives a very sharp opinion about what is needed to
transform julia in a better R, if that is possible. Julia is about speed and
no so much to make a big community, people use R because there are a lot of
packages and is easy to install and well supported. Python with pandas show
that you cat catchup is you try. So the question is if julia will receive some
strong support or will be always a second rank players, time will reveal.

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DonGateley
What I most like about this text is that it is about the R language and not
about the domain in which R has found the greatest application. I find R
perfectly suitable for basic, pre-statistical signal processing for example.
Far better than Matlab at a fundamental level. In fact, about anything that
Matlab is good for R is better. Except of course for the evolution of the
surrounding packages.

All the prior tutorials and courses I've seen presume and utilize a background
in the domain of statistics and a require a fairly strong one at that. I
strongly believe R should be sprung free of that encumbrance so as to find a
wider audience and this is a really good effort in that direction.

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markovbling
R is a lot like javascript - seems like voodoo until you 'get it' (get
comfortable using it) ... and then it's the obvious choice for many common
tasks.

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sonabinu
Absolutely agree!

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billwilliams
None of the comments here really capture the importance of this book in my
mind. Hadley-headed projects have dominated the data-science space for years -
defining how open source and commercial platforms are expressing data
processing + visualization.

This book gives you the tools to compose your own data tools using the
building blocks Hadley uses. That is a big deal. Everybody should buy 5
copies.

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velodrome
Advanced R (Chapman & Hall/CRC The R Series) by Hadley Wickham

[http://www.amazon.com/dp/1466586966/](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1466586966/)

How is the book compared to the site?

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withme
I'm fairly certain that they are identical. Hadley got the publisher to agree
to allow him to keep the website up after publishing.

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disgruntledphd2
Well yes, but the interface to the site is much more annoying than the book
(which is rather cheap for a textbook of this sort).

YMMV, but I got much more from the book than from the site, and was also able
to give hadley some money in the process, so its win-win :)

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hadley
Personally I prefer the website because I can normally remember which chapter
something is in, and then I can find-in-page to quickly jump to what I was
thinking about.

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singingfish
Aah yes the old "write a book to help one remember how to do it" trick. My
technical output spans a book and various places on the web. The number of
times I go googling for a solution, to find an interesting text ... then I
wonder who wrote it, look at the author and discover it was me. It makes me
laugh and cry at the same time :)

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baldfat
I worked through parts of the book (especially the functional programming
section). It is very well thought out and presented logically and clearly.

This has to be the effect of him doing live confresses and being a professor
while also knowing the packages as only an author can.

It is also great how approachable Hadley is in the community. I still remember
making a short tweet on dplyr and within 10 minutes he replied back to me and
answered my questions.

~~~
hadley
Thanks for the kind words!

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pamparosendo
I understood functional programming reading this website; thanks for that! And
ggplot2 aesthetics was the way to better understanding many of javascript
plotting libraries available. I personally still find data.table package more
confortable to use than piped dplyr, but I believe "this sane competition",
let's say, between packages is contributing enormously to R.

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sonabinu
I've had the most amazing opportunity to meet Hadley at a Users group meeting.
He is fantastic and very down to earth. Our group refers to his packages as
the Hadley stack and I've heard that reference elsewhere as well. He has made
a very powerful impact on how R has been evolving!

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kriro
Listened to the FLOSS weekly podcast where they had him on (it's a bit older)
recently during my commute. Recommended: [http://twit.tv/show/floss-
weekly/306](http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly/306)

