R for Data Science: Import, Tidy, Transform, Visualize, and Model Data

An excellent introduction to using R for Exploratory Analysis.

Wickham and Grolemund have produced an excellent book that would help a beginning R user become very efficient in explanatory analysis. Unsurprisingly the approach that they expound utilises the "hadleyverse" a collection of packages (ggplot2 for visualisation, tidyr for reshaping, dplyr for selecting and filtering, purrr for functional programming, broom for linear models etc) that dramatically speed up most of the common steps involved in an analysis. One benefit of Wickham's involvement in these packages has been a coherent philosophy that sits behind them. It can be a little tricky when learning this philosophy, but the long term benefits are enormous.

The book is broken up into a number of sections that effectively builds up the ability to ingest, transform, visualise and model datasets. A good portion of the book is available in an online version, to give you a taste of how it is written. Many have been following it as it was written. I have passed on copies of the book to a number of colleagues who were just starting out and the response has been uniformly positive. In my own case I was familiar with some of the these packages; ggplot2, dplyr, tidyr, but found the book taught me purrr and how to better use the packages together.

Probably my two biggest caveats to readers are that there are situations where packages from outside the "hadleyverse" maybe required. The authors do a great job of pointing this out, but it does pay in my experience to know data.table and lattice for example. Both because they can occasionally fit a problem better but also because you inevitably come across other people's code where these packages are used. The other caveat is that the modelling is a little rudimentary. Most of the examples are just fitting independent regression models, whereas it seems to me that a hierarchical model would be a better fit. Still these are small things and it would be silly to expect a single book to cover all of these areas.

In short this is the book I would give to someone who was keen to learn about how to use R for data science. It reads really well building up the different components whilst still being a valuable reference if you just need a reminder of a particular package (what is the difference between tibbles and data frames again?). Even though a good portion of the book is available online, it is well worth it to have the full thing on your bookshelf (digital or otherwise). On a broader note with Max Kuhn (author of the excellent "Applied Predictive Modelling" with Kjell Johnson) joining Wickham and Grolemund at RStudio, it is a great time to start your R journey.

This is a solid book and I am glad I purchased it

This is a solid book and I am glad I purchased it. That said, the book is not for the novice. I think it's most useful to people who have had an exposure to R or at least programming. I am a novice to the programming world (although with good experience in statistics using stats applications like SPSS and some basic syntax writing experience), and I found that while certain parts of the books were helpful, others moved very fast and completely over my head, without the sufficient detail or an explanation that I could dig my teeth into. The exercises were not terribly helpful at cementing the knowledge either: many are far more complex than the chapter itself (and no answers that I could find in the book--although I found the answers online). However, I don't know that there really are any solid guides written for the novice R user trying to learn data science, so this may still be the best of the bunch. In addition to reading this book, expect to be taking online courses on R and watching YouTube videos when you are stuck on a specific question.

Best book to learn how to handle data in R

Really enjoyed this book. Full of examples. Is a learning by doing book.

High quality printing, full color code and graphs. The book stay open.