What level are you looking to teach? MASS is fantastic but very terse; it presumes a good foundation in statistics and deals mainly with the computational aspects. My guess would be that this book would only really be suitable for a class with a good pre-existing background knowledge who are willing to work-hard and learn R quite rapidly. Once one's up to speed, however, it's a pretty indispensable resource.
I don't know the other two books personally, but their authors are quite well known in the R community and, like you, I've heard good things about both [books]. Prof. Dalgaard is in R-Core and Prof. Fox is an active package maintainer so they might jump in any minute to clarify the level of their books. Just browsing the ToC on Amazon, the subject matters also seem to be somewhat different so it might also be worthwhile deciding which bits of statistics your course aims to teach. If you can narrow down the scope of the course you can probably get a better recommendation. Hope this helps, Michael On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 8:17 AM, richard willey <richard.wil...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello > > I was hoping to get some advice regarding teaching R in an academic > environment. > > What are the best choices with respect to textbooks? > > When this question was asked a few years back, people were primarily > recommending “Modern Applied Statistics with S” and “Introductory > Statistics with R” as two good choices. I’ve also heard some good > thinks regarding “An R Companion to Applied Regression”. > > Has anything else really good come along in recent years? > > Alternatively, are there any really good companion textbooks / lab > manuals to accompany standard texts? > > Thanks in advance, > > Richard > > > > -- > I think back to the halcyon dates of my youth, when indeterminate > Hessians had something to do with the Revolutionary War, where > conjugate priors were monks who had broken their vows, and the > expression (X'X)^-1(X'Y) was greek > > Those were simpler times > > ______________________________________________ > R-help@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help > PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html > and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
