BARUG has also benefited from the financial support of Revolution Analytics
and countless hours, energy, and ideas from David Smith and Joe Rickert of
that firm.
Jay Emerson and Mike Kane, authors of the award-winningbigmemory
package in CRAN, read through an early draft of Chapter 16 on parallel R
programming and made valuable comments.
John Chambers (founder of S, the “ancestor” of R) and Martin Morgan
provided advice concerning R internals, which was very helpful to me for the
discussion of R’s performance issues in Chapter 14.
Section 7.8.4 covers a controversial topic in programming communities—
the use of global variables. In order to be able to get a wide range of perspec-
tives, I bounced my ideas off several people, notably R core group member
Thomas Lumley and my UC Davis computer science colleague, Sean Davis.
Needless to say, there is no implication that they endorse my views in that
section of the book, but their comments were quite helpful.
Early in the project, I made a very rough (and very partial) draft of the
book available for public comment and received helpful feedback from
Ramon Diaz-Uriarte, Barbara F. La Scala, Jason Liao, and my old friend
Mike Hannon. My daughter Laura, an engineering student, read parts of
the early chapters and made some good suggestions that improved the book.
My own CRAN projects and other R-related research (parts of which
serve as examples in the book) have benefited from the advice, feedback,
and/or encouragement of many people, especially Mark Bravington,
Stephen Eglen, Dirk Eddelbuett, Jay Emerson, Mike Kane, Gary King,
Duncan Murdoch, and Joe Rickert.
R core group member Duncan Temple Lang is at my institution, the
University of California, Davis. Though we are in different departments and
thus haven’t interacted much, this book owes something to his presence on
campus. He has helped to create a very R-aware culture at UCD, which has
made it easy for me to justify to my department the large amount of time
I’ve spent writing this book.
This is my second project with No Starch Press. As soon as I decided
to write this book, I naturally turned to No Starch Press because I like the
informal style, high usability, and affordability of their products. Thanks go
to Bill Pollock for approving the project, to editorial staff Keith Fancher and
Alison Law, and to the freelance copyeditor Marilyn Smith.
Last but definitely not least, I thank two beautiful, brilliant, and funny
women—my wife Gamis and the aforementioned Laura, both of whom
cheerfully accepted my statement “I’m working on the R book,” whenever
they asked why I was so buried in work.xviii Acknowledgments