The book R for Dummies was released recently, and was just reviewed by Dirk Eddelbuettel in the Journal of Statistical Software.

Dirk is an R luminary, creating such fantastic works as Rcpp. R for Dummies seems to have beaten Dirk’s natural disinclination to like anything with “for Dummies” appended to it, receiving a pretty positive review. Here is the last bit:

“R for Dummies may well break new ground, and introduce R to new audiences. The pricing is aggressive and should help the book to find its way into the hands of a large number of students, data analysis practitioners as well as researchers. They will find a well-written and easy-to-read introduction to the language and environment – if they can overcome any initial bias against a Dummies title as this reviewer did.”

I haven’t had a chance to read the text, but I have worked (albeit briefly) with Andie de Vries who is one of the authors. He is the author of several R packages up on CRAN, is a regular contributor to the R tag on Stack Overflow, and has a nuanced understanding of the language.