Tom,
 
Thanks for the reply to my question about books on R. WOW have I ever gotten a 
lot of recommendations.
 
I notice that you ended with talking about a workshop in the Great Smokey 
Mountains NP. My wife did her masters degree there, look at American Chestnut 
to do tree-ring analysis. She was working under Dr. Dave Stahle at the 
University of Arkansas. I helped her with field work at times and one time we 
almost got arrested by a park ranger when he saw us coming out of the woods 
carrying a chainsaw. That was fun.
 
Bob Keeland

hu, 11/18/10, tom_phili...@nps.gov <tom_phili...@nps.gov> wrote:


From: tom_phili...@nps.gov <tom_phili...@nps.gov>
Subject: Re: [R-sig-eco] New to R
To: "Bob Keeland" <keela...@yahoo.com>
Cc: tom_phili...@nps.gov, tephili...@gmail.com
Date: Thursday, November 18, 2010, 11:08 AM




Bob--

Bob Muenchen has a free 80 page pdf "R for SAS and SPSS Users":
http://RforSASandSPSSusers.com
and a larger book by the same name.

As for books, I would start with the Kuhnert & Venables book Mauricio Zapata 
sent a link to. You might be able to use only that as a general book, and spend 
your money on a couple of books on specific topics you need (e.g., Spector's 
little data manipulation book or Sarkar's lattice graphics book in the Springer 
UseR! series).

Maindonald's Data Analysis and Graphics Using R is quite good for an 
introductory book, but perhaps a couple of years out of date.  There's also a 
smaller version available as a free pdf from the page of contributed 
documentation:
http://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html


I dislike Crawley's R book: I suppose one would learn by working through it, 
but it is thick, with only a cryptic 1 level table of contents, and not that 
useful of an index, and material on a given topic is spread throughout the 
book.  

I started out liking Everitt & Hothorn's  Statistical Analysis Using R, but 
after trying to teach from it, I'm annoyed at some of the later chapters (such 
as longitudinal analysis) being somewhat misguided as well as incomplete.  
Horton & Kleinman's Using R for Data Management, Statistical Analysis, and 
Graphics looks pretty useful to me, but I haven't tried using it for teaching.

I find the Adler R in a Nutshell book surprisingly useful as a reference to 
find tools and functions in R that I didn't know about, even though I use the 
built in help system (?function or help(function)) for most of the syntax 
documentation.


Bob Muenchen has a free 80 page pdf "R for SAS and SPSS Users":
http://RforSASandSPSSusers.com
and a larger book by the same name.  [If that link doesn't work, I have a copy 
stashed at:
http://science.nature.nps.gov/im/monitor/stats/R/documentation/RforSASSPSSusers.pdf
 ]


Faraway's Extending the Linear Model ... book is quite good if you need mixed 
models, generalized linear models, and such.  I don't have his introductory 
Linear Models with R book, but folks seem to like it.  Faraway's Practical 
Regression and ANOVA is available as a free pdf from the contributed 
documentation page..

If you need generalized linear mixed models, wait for Doug Bates' book to come 
out in a couple of months; he posted draft pdfs at: 
http://lme4.r-forge.r-project.org/
Also, he has a vignette "lmer for SAS PROC MIXED Users": 
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/SASmixed/vignettes/Usinglmer.pdf

If you need any vegetation stuff, I recommend Dave Roberts' web page for 
vegetation ecology:
http://ecology.msu.montana.edu/labdsv/R/labs/
along with Jari Oksanen's vegan tutorial (vegan is the package for vegetation 
analyses, everything from various clustering and twinspan to various ordination 
forms to adonis, which partitions dissimilarity in an ANOVA-like manner based 
on the Marti Anderson papers.
http://cc.oulu.fi/~jarioksa/softhelp/vegan.html

Once you get your feet wet and have an idea of what specific R topics you need 
books on, the CRAN site has a list of books on R:
http://www.r-project.org/doc/bib/R-books.html
If you can't find the books you want on amazon or another source for 20% 
discount, the CRAN page has info on publisher's 20% discounts for almost every 
book.


Finally, I'm slowly populating a set of web pages on R for natural resources at:
http://science.nature.nps.gov/im/monitor/stats/R/index.cfm

Paul Geissler of USGS will be offering another free intermediate level webinar 
on R, probably starting in January, possibly not starting until the second week 
of February, after he and I lead our workshop at Great Smoky Mountains NP.  
http://www.fort.usgs.gov/brdscience/learnRE.htm

Tom

-------------------------------------------
Tom Philippi, Ph.D.
Quantitative Ecologist
Inventory and Monitoring Program
National Park Service
1201 Oakridge Drive, Suite 150
Ft. Collins, CO   80525-5589
tom_phili...@nps.gov    (970) 225-3586
Fax (970) 225 3597
http://science.nature.nps.gov/im/monitor
-------------------------------------------


-----r-sig-ecology-boun...@r-project.org wrote: -----


To: r-sig-ecology@r-project.org

Sent by: r-sig-ecology-boun...@r-project.org
Date: 11/17/2010 10:57AM
Subject: [R-sig-eco] New to R

OK all, I'm a research forest ecologist who worked for the US Fish & Wildlife 
Service and the US Geological Survey for 16 years after studying under Dr. 
Sharitz at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. Most of my work has been in 
bottomland hardwood forest and cypress/tupelo swamps of the Southeastern United 
States. My data analysis tool was SAS, and I do some programming in Visual 
Basic.  I now work with a very small company that has little in the way of data 
analysis or graphics capabilites. I therefore downloaded R and am trying to 
figure it out. 
 
Other than the "Introduction to R" manual and other things on the R website can 
you recommend a good book on R. My analysis needs are not that complex. I 
currently need to do an ANOVA on two tree populations to see if they are 
significantly different with respect to size (one area was polluted and the 
other is a control). I also need to do some point-quarter analysis for two 
separate forest populations, one in NE Texas and the other in S Mississipp).
 
Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
 
Bob Keeland
Research Forest Ecologist
Forest Dynamics, Inc.
Louisiana


     
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