Ironic the subject of this book is hell. I’m flying right now — my personal hell.
My favorite part of flying is airports because I’m fascinated by infectious disease. Let that one speak for itself. Regardless, I’m happy about the reason I’ve been flying. I got to enjoy a wonderful trip to Cary, North Carolina which should ring a bell to every statistician. The SAS campus was problematically incredible… I really wanted to be a professor. Guess that’s out the window now.
So, let’s talk about hell!
The R Infero
I doubt anyone studies statistics and grows passionate about programming because they’re completely mentally stable. I consider it to be a bonus of my field that everyone’s a little bit off and I don’t enjoy surrounding myself with those who are well put together. That said Burns is definitely a unique degree of disturbed, my kind of guy.
50 pages deep, the book is about how to be a better R programmer. Having now finished the book (I got too into it and refused to move to a different book) I would describe it as a guide to debugging R code. The convenient part about R being kind of a piece of shit is that a book from 2011 still accurately represents a lot of the issues with the language. This makes me like R even more. It’s a consistent piece of shit, so I can reliably predict when it’s going to fall apart on me.
I don’t know how much of my R programming is going to change because of Burns but my awareness of it is permanently altered. I’m well aware now that I shouldn’t be using = in place of <-, but I live dangerously. Also I can identify the times it’s inappropriate to use them as synonyms so I’ll risk falling into a trap in exchange for saving two keystrokes. That’s a vital quantity of efficiency (I will eat these words).
There isn’t much more to say about this book. It’s definitely an “advanced” text for R but I think it’s better placed in the hands of intermediate R programmers. Whether you understand its contents fully or not there’s a lot of good information that could makes its way into your programming via osmosis. I can imagine there are people who won’t find the book to be funny or enjoyable at times, although I can’t imagine they’re particularly rational people.
The book is an easy 10/10. Content useful at all levels, written at a middle school reading level, with a humorous tone and minimal fluff. Onwards in my masochistic trek I guess.
126/10263 = 1.228% of the way there