Books

The Computing Laboratory in the computer lab has a number of books on Splus³.

• Modern Applied Statistics with Splus, by Venables and Ripley (Springer-Verlag) is a fast-paced, authoritative and tightly-written book, and would be my clear choice as the one book on S you need (cost approximately $35). It includes software for a tutorial, a number of datasets and some ancillary routines defined in the book.
• StatSci manuals: including A Gentle Introduction to Splus, A Crash Course in Splus, User's Guide, Reference Manual, Guide to Statistical and Mathematical Analysis, Programmer's Manual. These manuals are authoritative for the version of Splus we use at HSPH. These are available for purchase from Statsci, but they are very pricey (the set goes for $165).
• New S Language, by Becker, Chambers and Wilks (Wadsworth and Brooks/Cole). This provides an overview of new S⁴. I find the first 100 pages of this book a very good introduction to S, but find that it loses the forest for the trees soon afterwards. In particular, it tends to get lost in data structures, grammar and lexical semantics plus state of the art object-oriented jargon. The index is particularly bad.
• Statistical Models in S, edited by Chambers and Hastie, (Chapman & Hall) is another book with much promise. It attempts to present approaches in S to fit and analyze statistical models. Unfortunately it suffers from being written by a committee and trying to isolate (unsuccessfully) lower level details from the overall big picture. Not a great way to learn how to model in S, unless you know the theory really well.
• An Introduction to S and S-plus, by Phil Spector (Duxbury/Wadsworth) is a book I've only briefly skimmed, and while it seemed a bit dated, folks whose opinions I respect say good things about it (i.e. Alan Zaslavsky from the Harvard Stat Dept. calls it a readable tutorial with a lot of good examples).

Documentation on locally installed packages is also available, either printed in the computer lab or online in /usr/local/splus3.4/library (version numbers may change).