"R in a Nutshell" provides a quick and practical way to learn this increasingly popular open source language and environment. Readers will not only learn how to program in R, but also how to find the right user-contributed R packages for statistical modeling, visualization, and bioinformatics.

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