Hey /g/. My dad wants some R programming books for Christmas. He's never programmed before, but he's a huge nerd who still maintains his love of learning.
So, I come to you today to ask for the best resources for learning R, especially those tailored to R as a first language. Thanks y'all.
>>51939582
bump
please help me help my nerd dad
What stats background does he have?
You can always search "R programming language" on amazon or ebay.
Happy Chanukah OP, have a bump for interest.
>>51939582
The only reddit page worthy of a bookmark:
http://www.reddit.com/r/trackers/comments/hrgmv/tracker_with_pdfsebooks_of_college_textbooks/c1xrq44
>>51940101
Er, he has a Ph.D in Chemistry and an MBA, has been on Wall Street been a hedge fund manager for last last couple decades. I don't know what kind of academic vs intuitive level of stats background he has, though.
>>51940128
he did that and picked a textbook that I found online for him (http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/) and quant trading books, one in general and one specific to R.
>>51940196
Tell him to get an ipad or some shit and download bundles of ebooks (use a VPN of course; I recommend myanonamouse if you can get membership there, or just use kat.cr). You can store thousands of them on a device that weighs 1/10th of a single textbook.
>>51940489
He has a Kindle, but I think the rest does not quite align with his morals. To be fair, he asked for Kindle versions of the books mentioned in >>51940196.
>>51940530
>but I think the rest does not quite align with his morals.
You have fun with that then.
Our work here is done; use google.
>>51940578
Alright, I'll keep looking. Was just wondering if there were any specific recommendations.
> Not knowing the gospel of Hadley Wickham
http://adv-r.had.co.nz/
A bit outdated, but here's something I used: http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/132/NSPpart.pdf
Make sure he gets RStudio too. Makes it much better. So go to the CRAN site to download R, and then download RStudio. R is pretty easy and it will be easiest to learn by picking a data set and analyzing it. As he thinks of different tasks (e.g. finding the average of a column, making a scatterplot of variables), he can find almost everything via google. The stackoverflow community is robust for R.
R Inferno is a fun read
>>51940196
>Ph.D in Chemistry with an MBA
>can't figure out how to use Google
R and Rstudio have extensive built-in documentation
you literally type in ?whatever into the command line and it will give you thorough documentation for the function. for example, i enter ?lm() and it gives me this entire page in lower right quadrant of my Rstudio session:
https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/stats/html/lm.html
not to mention you can simply google "r lm()" and you will get at least a dozen pages explaining it in even further detail. and this isn't just for common functions. there are even more extensive guides for larger more complex packages. plus the usual information sharing sources like stackoverflow
tell your old dad to learn google because it will take him further than the index of a textbook. you can't copy paste printed examples into Rstudio to test some new info out.
>>51942754
>>51942557
He knows how to Google, guys. Just wondering what the /g/ consensus was.
Anyway, thanks y'all, I sent him pretty much all these suggestions.
>>51939582
R in a Nutshell?
