The Shape of Code

I see that Hadley Wickham’s new book, “Advanced R”, is being published in dead tree form and will be available a month or so. Hadley has generously made the material available online; I quickly skimmed the material a few months ago when I first heard about it and had another skim this afternoon.

The main problem with the book is its title, authors are not supposed to write advanced books and then call them advanced. When I studied physics the books all had “advanced” in their titles, but when I got to University the books switched to having some variant of “fundamental” in their title. A similar pattern applies to computer books, with the books aimed at people who know a bit and want to learn a bit more having an advanced-like word in their title and the true advanced stuff having more downbeat titles, e.g., Javascript: The Good Parts, “Algorithms in Snobol 4”, Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs.

Some alternative title suggestions: “R: Some important bits”, “The Anatomy of R” or “The nitty gritty of R”.

The book is full of useful technical details that are scattered about and time consuming to find elsewhere; a useful reference manual, covering how to do technical stuff in R, to have on the shelf.

My main quibble with the book is the amount of airplay that the term “functional programming” gets. Does anybody really care that R has a strong functional flavor? Would many R users recognize another functional language if it jumped up and bit them? The die hard functional folk would probably say that R is not really a functional language, but who cares. I think people who write about R should stop using the words “functional programming”, it just confuses R users and serves no useful purpose; just talk about the convenient things that R allows us to write.

A book that I would really like to read is the R equivalent of books such as “Algorithms in Snobol 4”, “Effective C++” and “SQL for Smarties” (ok, that one has advanced in the subtitle), that take a wide selection of relatively simple problems and solve them in ways that highlight different aspects of the language (perhaps providing multiple solutions to the same problem).