R is a popular tool among data scientists because it’s just like a Swiss Army knife (or may be more!) for them!

Analogy credit: Tapping the Data Deluge with R by Jeffrey Breen

Sometime back I worked on a research project that involved writing some R code – we were searching for tools ways to pull data from multiple social networks, perform text analysis and create effective data visualizations. R seemed like a great tool & so I was searching for a book/guides that teaches me fundamentals I needed to know to get few R related things done. One of the books that I used often during the research project was “R in nutshell”. I didn’t read it cover-to-cover but it was a great reference book for me. I used to read guides online/other-books and then I used to combine information from this book to get stuff done. The section I liked the most was on Data visualization which included some great code snippets to create effective data visualization using ggplot2 library. I used to take code snippets from this book & apply it on data-sets that I had.

Fun stuff!

Also, I liked it that the book has some end-to-end examples that cover the entire life cycle of data analysis/statistical-analysis.

Summary:

I recommend this book as a “reference” for someone who started working with R.

Note:

I received a copy of this book as part of OREILLY’s Blogger program. Thanks OREILLY! If you are a blogger, you should check out that program!