R in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Acknowledgments

First, I’d like to thank everyone who read the first book. I wrote R in a Nutshell to be useful. I tried to write the book that I wanted to read; I tried my best to share as much useful information as I could about R. That’s an ambitious goal, and I wrote an imperfect book. I appreciate all the feedback, suggestions, and corrections that I have received from readers and have tried my best to improve the book in the second edition.

I’d like to thank the team at O’Reilly for their support. Tim O’Reilly has said that he follows three guiding principles: work on something that matters to you more than money, create more value than you capture, and take the long view.^[2] I tried to follow these principles when writing this book. As an author, I felt like the team at O’Reilly followed these principles. My goal in writing R in a Nutshell was to write the best book I could write. I hope that when people read this book, they learn something new and use what they learned to solve important problems.

Many people helped support the writing of this book. First, I’d like to thank all of my technical reviewers. These folks check to make sure the examples work, look for technical and mathematical errors, and make many suggestions on writing quality. It’s not possible to write a quality technical book without quality technical reviewers: Peter Goldstein, Aaron Mandel, and David Hoaglin are the reason that this book reads as well as it does.

For the past two years, I’ve worked at LinkedIn, ...