Chapter 1 Another or an other book?

It is obvious that there is already a glamorous body of books about using R, some of them with an appealing flavour of writing, some rather straightforward, some partly cryptic. R is described from so many different angles and user perspectives, one might indeed (and in the case of this book absolutely obviously) ask: Why another book?

Don’t think I wrote this book just for the splendid reader. I am also a bit egoistic and writing things up let’s one think about them and question the correctness of one’s daily work and the approaches that come to the mind while using R. But there is also another reason for me to write down essential parts and patches about R and how I understand and use it. While most books arrange their content logically according to a common workflow (my main chapters actually do this, as well) or from small to big or simple to complex, this book is simply an organised collection of receipes, arranged by the purpose of application. There will be only minimum introduction to the content of each chapter and there will usually be no such thing like a didactic arrangement of chapter content. Rather there will be task-oriented code snippets optimised for copy-paste action.

There are some exceptions. One is the chapter Kaleidocsope, which is just a pure collection of graphs, maps and other materials produced with R that I thought would be interesting to show. At least I had great fun producing or reproducing them.

ATTENTION ATTENTION! This online book is currently in the development stage. Its content and perhaps also its layout will change from time to time. Please do not consider it as a finished work, yet!

I started working on it in June 2016 and will continue working on it whenever there is time and a mood for it.