Another review of Introducing … R

The March 2011 issue of JASA contains a review of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R by Hedibert Lopes. As in the previous review, the poor quality of the figures is (rightly) pointed out by Hedie. However, the main message of the review remains very positive and, furthermore, Hedie advertises the ‘Og itself in the review! E.g.,

Another dynamic media for the iteration between the reader and the book is Christian Robert’s blog where, among other things, readers and users of his several books point out typos, ask questions, make suggestions, and more importantly, find answers to these requests. For more details, visit http://www.ceremade.dauphine.fr/~xian/books.html or http://xianblog.wordpress.com/2010/02/ 10/ typos-in-chapters-1-8.

Just one minor point: Hedie mentions that he hopes the figures defaults can be corrected in the second edition. Actually, because this book is part of the print-on-demand strategy, we can make changes almost instantly. So taking into account the use of jpeg files instead of pdf ones, and the many typos signaled by readers, I sent a revised version of the book a few weeks ago and thus hope in-coming books should be free of those defects. As a conclusion, here is Hedie’s

I am convinced the book will be particularly useful for (and should be next to the computer of) a large body of hands-on graduate students, researchers, instructors, and practitioners with at least one year of graduate-level statistical background and interested in simultaneously learning and applying R programming and Monte Carlo tools to assist the statistical analysis and computation of their scientific problems.