I missed out on www.yarrr.com (some domain squatter is holding it for a pirate’s ransom), but I was able to snag www.thepiratesguidetor.com! This is now the official home of YaRrr! The Pirate’s Guide to R

For those of you who don’t know, this whole story started last summer. I was taking a late night swim on the Bodensee in Konstanz and saw a rusty object sticking out of the water. Upon digging it out, I realised it was an ancient usb-stick with the word YaRrr inscribed on the side. Intrigued, I brought it home and plugged it into my laptop. Inside the stick, I found a single pdf file written entirely in pirate-speak. After watching several pirate movies, I learned enough pirate-speak to begin translating the text to English. Sure enough, the book turned out to be an introduction to R called The Pirate’s Guide to R.

This book clearly has both massive historical and pedagogical significance. Most importantly, it turns out that pirates were programming in R well before the earliest known advent of computers. Of slightly less significance is that the book has turned out to be a surprisingly up-to-date and approachable introductory text to R. For both of these reasons, I felt it was my duty to share the book with the world. You can download the latest version of the pdf (again, I am continually updating the translations) by clicking on the pirate’s beard below: