{"id":736,"date":"2014-10-07T14:29:36","date_gmt":"2014-10-07T22:29:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/formidableengineeringconsultants.com\/?p=736"},"modified":"2026-05-03T21:16:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T05:16:18","slug":"log-rolling-in-our-times-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/formidableengineeringconsultants.com\/?p=736","title":{"rendered":"Log Rolling In Our Times (Part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"lrg\"<\/a>This is the second installment in my irregular series of book reviews for O’Reilly Media<\/a>. In the interests of full disclosure, I received this ebook for free in exchange for this review. I get to keep it even if I hate it and they will publish this review on their web site even if I trash the volume completely.<\/p>\n

The book under the microscope this time is “The R Cookbook” by Paul Teetor<\/a>. For those of you unfamiliar, R is a powerful, free, open source programming language and environment used for statistical programming and analysis. It features a rich graphical display language to assist in data visualization. You can think of it as a scripting language akin to Excel Spreadsheets or a variant of MATLAB focused on statistics. The language includes a full suite of community-developed, sector-specific libraries that provide re-usable functions typical of industry needs. These libraries indicate the areas in which R has found popularity.This includes the worlds of finance, genomics, statistics and data science.<\/p>\n

The R Cookbook describes itself as a book for the user who is somewhat familiar with R but needs easy access to useful techniques and common R program building blocks. The book is arranged as a series of recipes. Each recipe describes a problem that you might trying to solve and then a solution or possible solutions to resolve the issue. For instance “You want a basic statistical summary of your data” is described as the problem to solve and then the text provides you with at least one approach to providing a solution to that problem.<\/p>\n

The structure of the book is such that it begins with simpler recipes and builds its way up to more complex ones. In fact, because of this structure, I would recommend this book as a great tool to learning R for the novice despite the book’s self-identification of that being its incorrect use. The rational behind this recommendation is that the beginning recipes are tasks like “How do I install R?” and similar novice tasks. It then builds slowly from there into a use cases and scenarios of increasing complexity and utility.<\/p>\n

The book includes great examples that illustrate the power of R in doing data transformation, probability and statistical analysis. It also shows how you can use R to provide meaningful graphical representations of your results. The chapter on ‘Useful Tricks’ is what seals the deal for me providing 19 great pointers to allow you to improve your R analyses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second installment in my irregular series of book reviews for O’Reilly Media. In the interests of full disclosure, I received this ebook for free in exchange for this review. I get to keep it even if I hate it and they will publish this review on their web site even if I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[86,87,47,68,84,85,15,51],"tags":[74,6,88,38,89],"class_list":["post-736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-data-2","category-book-reviews","category-data","category-innovation","category-programming","category-programming-languages","category-software","category-software-tips-tricks","tag-big-data","tag-new","tag-reviews","tag-revolutionary","tag-software"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t