R for Data Science

这本书最打动人的，不是教人如何调用函数，而是重塑了与数据相处的方式。作者Hadley Wickham把tidyverse这套理念贯穿全书：数据应当是“整齐”的，处理应当是“管道化”的，可视化应当是“逐层叠加”的。对许多读者而言，这恰恰是他们弃R而求Python后又回头的原因——R原本混乱的语法，被tidyverse梳理得清晰优雅。书中反复出现的一个判断格外醒目：正确问题的近似答案，远胜错误问题的确切答案。它提醒读者，数据科学的重心不在技巧炫技，而在提出对的问题。不过也有读者冷静地指出，R并非万能，统计场景下Stata更直观，不必神化。正因如此，这本书适合愿意接受一种现代数据范式、而非只想速成调包的人；若你只想要“省劲儿”的实用工具，或许会嫌它理念过重。

Hadley Wickham is an Assistant Professor and the Dobelman FamilyJunior Chair in Statistics at Rice University. He is an active memberof the R community, has written and contributed to over 30 R packages, and won the John Chambers Award for Statistical Computing for his work developing tools for data reshaping and visualization. His research focuses on how to make data analysis better, faster and easier, with a particular emphasis on the use of visualization to better understand data and models. Garrett Grolemund is a statistician, teacher and R developer who currently works for RStudio. He sees data analysis as a largely untapped fountain of value for both industry and science. Garrett received his Ph.D at Rice University in Hadley Wickham's lab, where his research traced the origins of data analysis as a cognitive process and identified how attentional and epistemological concerns guide every data analysis. Garrett is passionate about helping people avoid the frustration and unnecessary learning he went through while mastering data analysis. Even before he finished his dissertation, he started teaching corporate training in R and data analysis for Revolutions Analytics. He's taught at Google, eBay, Axciom and many other companies, and is currently developing a training curriculum for RStudio that will make useful know-how even more accessible. Outside of teaching, Garrett spends time doing clinical trials research, legal research, and financial analysis. He also develops R software, he's co-authored the lubridate R package which provides methods to parse, manipulate, and do arithmetic with date-times and wrote the ggsubplot package, which extends the ggplot2 package.