S Poetry

What is it?

A book about using the S language.  There are two main dialects of S:

• R (created by the R Project for Statistical Computing)
• S-PLUS (now S+ owned by TIBCO)

Why would I care?

There are other reasons, but perhaps the two best points are:

• There is a glossary of jargon
• There is a chapter on arrays with more than 2 dimensions

Getting it

You can get the S Poetry pdf for free.

You can buy the paperback of S Poetry.

Changes since publication

S Poetry was written when R was in its infancy, and version 4 of the S language was not yet publicly available. There have been a number of changes since then.

If you are using R, probably the best way to figure out what is not right in S Poetry is to read about the differences between R and S in the R FAQ (ISBN 3-901167-51-X) on the R Project Home Page .

If you are using S-PLUS, almost everything is still true (except some of the bugs are fixed). However there are some new features that are useful.

See also

The genopt function is in the BurStMisc R package. It is compared to other optimizers in “A comparison of some heuristic optimization methods”.

Tao Te Programming goes beyond S Poetry in exploring what good programming is about (but in a language-neutral manner).

The R Inferno highlights trouble spots of R (and S+).