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Not worth your time or money
Top reviews from the United States
Not worth your time or money
Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2026
This is without a doubt the worst book I've ever read, and that's really saying something because I've been pretty adventurous with the technical books I've purchased. It was truly a struggle to read this, but I persisted from cover to cover. I'll keep most of the review brief because the attached image covers most of what I want to say well. The book is very low quality in several dimensions.
First, the typesetting is awful. If you've read many technical books, you might be used to some kind of code formatting, usually with a monospace font and/or some kind of textbox or background color (sometimes even syntax highlighting) to differentiate it from the prose. As you can see here, neither the inline code nor the blocks of code use a different style, and the code example is even justified across the width of the page. You might think this is a minor or superficial issue, and to some extent that's true, but this book has code examples on every single page, and it's presented either as oddly wrapped and spaced text that looks just like the prose or as screenshots of RStudio, as you can also see in the image.
The second major issue is the writing itself, which is mind-numbingly repetitive. Actually the picture cuts part of this off, unfortunately, but just read section 12.6 here.
> mean_sepal_length = mean(Sepal.Length): Computes the mean of the Sepal.Length...
This is not an isolated example. I took this photo after turning to a random page. This is what the whole book is like.
This leads into the final problem that I'll touch on, which is that the book covers every subject at approximately the same level of depth. This means that there's an entire chapter dedicated to navigating the RStudio installer on Windows at the start and a whole chapter dedicated to changing the working directory (near the end!), but actually important aspects of R or using R for biological analysis are kind of skimmed over. Maybe "at the same level" is being too generous. After writing that previous sentence it seems clear that minutiae like clicking through an installer is given far more prominence than the apparent goal of the book (learning R).
This book will not teach you R, and it will certainly not teach you to program. Even worse, it will try to bore you to tears on the way to nowhere. If you're looking to learn R, I would highly recommend just reading through the free documentation on the R website, and if you really want a book, checking out the list they provide there. To the extent that this book contains useful information, you'll find it in a much better form just about anywhere else.
