Learning R: which book to choose?

I am new to R. I am going to by one of the following book:

1.
William N. Venables and Brian D. Ripley. Modern Applied Statistics 
with S-Plus.
Third Edition. Springer, 1999. ISBN 0-387-98825-4.

2.
 The  Fourth Edition of the book from point 1.

3.
`S Programming'
 by W. N. Venables and B. D. Ripley
 Springer. ISBN 0-387-98966-8, 2000.

It depends.  Do you want to use R for analysis, or to write your
own extensions?  Probably the first, I'd guess; extension writing 
usually comes later.

Modern Applied Statistics with S-Plus, 4th edition (MASS4) is a good 
introduction if you're already a statistician.  If not, a a good
introductory book is

Introductory Statistics with R.  Peter Dalgaard.  Springer.
ISBN 0387954759

MASS4 is certainly more complete than ISwR, but if you're not already 
a statistician, it's a difficult starting book (challenging, but not
impossible).

Cheers

Jason

Indigo Industrial Controls Ltd.
64-21-343-545
jasont at indigoindustrial.co.nz
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._