R in a Nutshell

Acknowledgments

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.

I’d like to thank Randall Munroe, author of the xkcd comic. He kindly allowed us to reprint two of his (excellent) comics in this book. You can find his comics (and assorted merchandise) at http://www.xkcd.com.

Additionally, I’d like to thank everyone who provided or suggested example data. Aaron Schatz of Football Outsiders (http://www.footballoutsiders.com) provided me with play-by-play data from the 2005 NFL season (the field goal data is from its database). Sandor Szalma of Johnson & Johnson suggested GSE2034 as an example of gene expression data.

Finally, I’d like to thank my wife, Sarah, and my daughter, Zoe. Writing a book takes a lot of time, and they were very understanding when I needed to work. They were also very understanding when I dragged them to the San Diego Zoo to look at the harpy eagles.