» Data Manipulation with R (Use R)

Data Manipulation with R (Use R) Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: Start here
Comment: All too often novices wanting to use R for an analysis never get to the analysis because they can't successfully import, clean-up and restructure their data for the analysis functions. This book prevents those problems by telling you the critical data and file manipulation materials that are usually briefly (and inadequately) covered in stat books. It is a short easy read that will give you the tools to get your data ready to go.

You can see the table of contents and read the other reviews but areas that really shine include: dealing with categorical (named or ordered) factor variables, recoding numeric data into categorical variables, and also making and working with summary tables.

When it comes to data manipulation and clean-up Spector has the best coverage of any book or web FAQ. This book is very expensive for its size but it is worth every cent.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Important text
Comment: Data manipulation can often take as long as or longer than the actual analysis. The ability to manipulate data is not emphasized enough. This book gives a great introduction to this skill set. It is clearly written and provides good examples.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Not much book for the price
Comment: The title of the book implied a lot and the book did not deliver. If the book had twice as many pages it would have come close to the title's promise because the author would have had enough space to cover the broad area of manipulation of data in R. I felt as if the author was forced to discuss a topic in as little space as possible. Some the discussions where cursory at best. There was just enough information to leave you wandering what could have been said to give the reader a more in depth understanding of the topic.

I think the author knows this material "like the back of his hand", but, he forgot that the readers do not.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Great little book
Comment: This concise 150 page book contains a wealth of information, writen clearly and with many well-chosen examples. I liked it a lot. It covers reading and writing data in/out of the R workspace, including access to databases. The names of other chapters suggest the topics covered: "Dates", "Factors", "Subscripting", "Character manipulation", "Data aggregation", "Reshaping data".

This book will be helpful to any but the most absolutely new to R, and even the seasoned user will find interesting hints and examples. I cannot recommend it enough.

One minor qualm I have is the absence of references. Some topics (for instance, regular expressions) are fairly complex, and well documented elsewhere: a pointer or two would be helpful. Same with, for instance, SQL, which is mentioned and demonstrated briefly.

Another not-so-minor qualm is price. A book of this size from, for instance, Dover classics collection, with similar paper quality and covers, is about a third or fourth of the price. Although this is a new book I find the $54.95 tag (Amazon discounted price is about $44.50) fairly high. But this has nothing to do with the quality of the book, rather it has to do with the Springer pricing policies.

All in all, if you don't mind the price, this is a good buy.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: a must for statisticians wanting to learn R
Comment: This book along with Jim Albert's should be read by every statistician that does a lot of statistical computing. Both books help you learn R quickly and apply it to many important problems in research both applied and theoretical. Albert emphasizes applications in Bayesian statistics whereas Spector is teaching how to do data manipulation, things like merging and transposing data sets. These techniques can be easy to do in a language like SAS after a little training but in other programming languages it can be very difficult.

---