Book Review: The Art of R Programming

My former professor, Norm Matloff, wrote “The Art of R Programming” and NoStarch Press was kind enough to send me a review copy.

The Art of R Programming is a straight forward explanation of R for programmers who are reasonably familiar with programming in another language. Matloff makes no assumptions of expertise in C or algorithms and his explanations are succinct and easy to follow.

If you’re aren’t familiar with R, it is a statistical programming language, with some similarities to Matlab.

Rating 9/10

The big advantages of R are (1) it’s high level, (2) reasonably easy to read, (3) functional in nature, (4) simple syntax. If you’re familiar with Python, it has a similar feel. Compared to complex languages such as C++, Java, etc, R is a breadth of fresh air due to the lightness of its syntax. That said as a programming language Python is nicer. R has a few annoyances (for me at least) that make it less pleasant to write in than Python.
A couple of those are:

• Non-standard assignment operator e.g. to assign 5 to x in R we use “x <- 5" instead of the normal "x = 5" used in other languages. This is annoying because a significant amount of programming is doing assignments and a two character assignment operator is twice as much typing. Contrast this with Python which uses the plain "x = 5".
• Vector creation using “c(1,2,3,4)”. Vectors in R are similar to lists in Python, it would be more natural to add a little syntactic sugar and use “[1,2,3,4]” for vector creation i.e. the same syntax as Python and many other languages.

The real reason to use R are its statistical libraries, it’s very widely used for statistics and is the most pleasant environment to work in.

The areas Matloff covers are:

1 Why R?	2 Getting Started	3 Vectors
4 Matrices	5 Lists	6 Data Frames
7 Factors and Tables	8 R Programming Structures	9 R Functions
10 Doing Math in R	11 Input/Output	12 Object-Oriented Programming
13 Graphics	14 Debugging	15 Writing Fast R Code
16 Interfacing R to Other Languages	17 Parallel R	18 String Manipulation
19 Installation: R Base, New Packages	20 User Interfaces	21 To Learn More

Much of the material is available online in tutorials such as John Cook’s, R Language For Programmers. The real gems are the chapters “Writing Fast R Code”, “Interfacing R to Other Languages”, and “Parallel R”. These chapters have great information that is not easily discoverable otherwise.

“The Art of R Programming” is a fun read, albeit somewhat specialized. If you need to do statistical work as a programmer I highly recommend buying it and spending an afternoon browsing it.

Book Review: Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!

No Starch Press was kind enough to mail me a review copy of Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!.

Rating: 10/10

Miran Lipovaca has done a fantastic job of writing a book aimed at beginning Haskell programmers. I like his very straightforward writing style of introducing each topic with the minimum of complexity.

As you probably already know the book is available online for free at http://learnyouahaskell.com so the question becomes why purchase the dead tree copy? To be honest I don’t recommend buying a dead tree copy if you have a Kindle.

To summarize there are three ways to read the book:

• Dead tree
• EBook
• Online

My preference in order is the e-book on the Kindle, the dead tree version, and finally the online version. For some reason I don’t like the formatting of the online version as much as either the dead tree version or the ebook. It’s partly because I have a harder time reading books on the computer than either on the Kindle or in paper back.
No Starch did a great job of printing “Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!” on quality paper and the binding is excellent. As with all previous No Starch books I’ve purchased the physical layout and ink quality of the book are both excellent.

The table of contents is:

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Starting Out
• 3. Types and Typeclasses
• 4. Syntax in Functions
• 5. Recursion
• 6. Higher Order Functions
• 7. Modules
• 8. Making Our Own Types and Typeclasses
• 9. Input and Output
• 10. Functionally Solving Problems
• 11. Functors, Applicative Functors and Monoids
• 12. A Fistful of Monads
• 13. For a Few Monads More
• 14. Zippers

Miran does an amazing job of keeping each chapter short and interspersing lighthearted comments. The table of contents should be self explanatory, as you can see he covers mostly just the fundamentals of Haskell and ends with Monads. There is the extra chapter on zippers which seems like an afterthought.

Comparing this book to Real World Haskell, they serve slightly different purposes. “Real World Haskell” assumes that you are already reasonably proficient as a programmer whereas this book introduces each topic without assuming much programming background knowledge. Also “Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!” is meant less as a reference text and more for reading from start to end. They are both fantastic books and I highly recommend reading both of them. “Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!” is a gentler introduction to Haskell and I recommend reading it first.