If you're considering R for statistical computing and data visualization, this book provides a quick and practical guide to just about everything you can do with the open source R language and software environment. You'll learn how to write R functions and use R packages to help you prepare, visualize, and analyze data. Author Joseph Adler illustrates each process with a wealth of examples from medicine, business, and sports.

Updated for R 2.14 and 2.15, this second edition includes new and expanded chapters on R performance, the ggplot2 data visualization package, and parallel R computing with Hadoop.

• Get started quickly with an R tutorial and hundreds of examples
• Explore R syntax, objects, and other language details
• Find thousands of user-contributed R packages online, including Bioconductor
• Learn how to use R to prepare data for analysis
• Visualize your data with R's graphics, lattice, and ggplot2 packages
• Use R to calculate statistical fests, fit models, and compute probability distributions
• Speed up intensive computations by writing parallel R programs for Hadoop
• Get a complete desktop reference to R