SocProf reviewed Easy R by Elizabeth A. Gohmert
Review of 'Easy R' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
The premise of this book is that all the introductions to R are too difficult, especially for absolute beginners and people who are not and will never be computer scientists. They have a point there.
So, they wrote a book for these two categories of people, hence a boo organization that is very unlike every other intro to R I have ever read. After the usual "how to install R and R Studio" chapter, the authors dive directly into R markdown and how to write papers entirely in R markdown. There is no customary introduction to the R language. The code is only provided on a need to know basis. Follows a chapter on generating small and simple datasets to practice visualizing variables in basic plots. The most complex chapter is the data preparation chapter, using the Tidyverse. There is also a chapter, often not present in introduction to R, …
The premise of this book is that all the introductions to R are too difficult, especially for absolute beginners and people who are not and will never be computer scientists. They have a point there.
So, they wrote a book for these two categories of people, hence a boo organization that is very unlike every other intro to R I have ever read. After the usual "how to install R and R Studio" chapter, the authors dive directly into R markdown and how to write papers entirely in R markdown. There is no customary introduction to the R language. The code is only provided on a need to know basis. Follows a chapter on generating small and simple datasets to practice visualizing variables in basic plots. The most complex chapter is the data preparation chapter, using the Tidyverse. There is also a chapter, often not present in introduction to R, on finding and getting datasets.
The last chapter is a set of three exercises based on all the skills built in the previous 3 chapters, and the entire loop is closed with a return to R markdown at the end.
This was an intriguing quick read, which I enjoyed quite a bit. It's a shame that the advertised website, that is supposed to include all the code, is not up and running.
However, this is interesting enough an approach to R that I'm seriously considering giving it a try in my introduction to data science class.