By the review, this sounds like it could be a great book. I've read, err skimmed, plenty of R books including the official documentation. Everything I've read so far about R was quite obviously written for a different audience. This seems to be aimed at telling visual stories with data, which is the only part of R I've ever wanted to learn.
If you're interested in good references for being able to produce `visual stories' I suggest you have a look into the R package `ggplot2' [1].
It's a great way (although a little challenging at first) of being able to produce almost all of the types of plots you're interested in creating. The author of the package also wrote a great book [2] on the package which is worth a read.
A note though, most information on `ggplot2' isn't really aimed at informing you which is the most appropriate plot, merely that a type of plot can be quickly produced.
It's been a while since I've read it, but I was one of the technical readers for this book—and now that it's done, I need to dig it out and look at it again.
I wanted to get involved in reading this one because of all the great stuff I'd heard about R (mostly on HN, but also from someone I know in the Ruby community who is deeply into stats and speaks highly of R). I found this book really useful when I was reviewing it because I really was coming from a near-zero background (I last studied statistics in '92).
The sad part is that I didn't have a job where doing this sort of analysis would have helped; with what I'm working on now, that may change.
I liked the book, but unfortunately didn't have anything to which I could apply it. It's great to have my reviewer's copy because now I can go through it again and try to find things to apply it to.
I'm looking forward to digging into this book as well. I've gone through most of R Graphs (Packt) and R Cookbook (O'Reilly) which are great for learning the nuts and bolts of R and R in Action looks to be the next step.
Will definitely check out this book. I recently learned some R and just used it for a very specific type of programming task (Morphometrics for a biologist).
Very happy to have learned a new language outside of my normal Python/PHP/JavaScript realm. If you're looking to learn a new language that is a bit different than what you might be used to and want to brush up on some math, I highly recommend playing with R for a while.
Another book to checkout is O'Reilly's Data Analysis with Open Source Tools, which has sections on R and NumPy.
