A few months ago I reviewed a new book on R, called Introduction to Scientific Programming and Simulation Using R, Second Edition, by Owen Jones, Robert Maillardet, and Andrew Robinson. I liked the book — R is becoming more popular and widely used as a language and tool to parse and process the increasing amounts of data around us, and this book provides a rich introduction to the power of R.
One of the authors contacted me to thank me for my review, which I really appreciated.
But he also mentioned something that made me love the book even more.
Note that the tagline for my website is: “Dancing with the Jabberwock”.
You know what a Jabberwock is, right? It’s from that wonderful poem “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass
Well, it turns out, there are several exercises in the book’s chapter on Markov Chains featuring the Jabberwock! The goal of the exercises is to model the movements of the Jabberwock through the Tulgey Wood while you lie in wait with your vorpal sword. How long do you expect to wait?
Here comes the Jabberwock, whiffling through the trees. What will you do? Arm yourself with this book, and you’ll be ready not only for the Jabberwock, but also any dataset that comes galumphing along.