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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).
Next: Help system
Up: Documentation
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Elizabeth Brown
1998-11-09