Data manipulation With R

What Hacker News says

1. disgruntledphd2Jan 2012
   While I agree on the R mailing list and StackOverflow (subscribe for r on the RSS feed) i would respectfully suggest that you ignore R in a Nutshell. While it does have some interesting worked examples and some good explanation, the book is essentially a commented version of the R introductory manuals.

   The refcard is wonderful though. Personally, I found R bloggers really useful, just reading through all the articles is a nice way to learn the packages and tricks of the language (some of the code on the R help mailing list is also extremely useful here).

   In terms of short, concise, wonderful books Data Manipulation with R is a favourite. Its only 150 pages, but it describes how to move your data from one form to another in the best and easiest ways. The SQL stuff and the regular expressions might already be known to the people here, but some of the material on dates, times and general reshaping of data was extremely useful (to me at least). R is not strong in this area, IMO and its nice to see some guidance in this area, as R packages often have funky data shape requirements.

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2. etrainJan 2012
   Fair enough - I've had some good experience pointing new R users to R in a Nutshell - but maybe Data Manipulation with R is better. Haven't used it and will take a look.

   One invaluable resource I forgot to point out was: http://www.statmethods.net/ Very concise, directed pages that help you understand common/acceptable ways to do specific things.

   For plotting, I usually skip the base R plots and go with ggplot2.

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