Acknowledgments

We wish to thank our colleagues and others who read and commented on our early chapter drafts. Special appreciation goes to our reviewers: Charles C. Earl, Christopher Kardell, David Meza, Domingo Salazar, Doug Sparling, James Black, John MacKintosh, Owen Morris, Pascal Barbedo, Robert Samohyl, and Taylor Dolezal. Their comments, questions, and corrections have greatly improved this book. We especially would like to thank our development editor, Dustin Archibald, and Cynthia Kane, who worked on the first edition, for their ideas and support. The same thanks go to Nichole Beard, Benjamin Berg, Rachael Herbert, Katie Tennant, Lori Weidert, Cheryl Weisman, and all the other editors who worked hard to make this a great book.

In addition, we thank our colleague David Steier, Professor Doug Tygar from UC Berkeley’s School of Information Science, Professor Robert K. Kuzoff from the Departments of Biological Sciences and Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, as well as all the other faculty and instructors who have used this book as a teaching text. We thank Jim Porzak, Joseph Rickert, and Alan Miller for inviting us to speak at the R users groups, often on topics that we cover in this book. We especially thank Jim Porzak for having written the foreword to the first edition, and for being an enthusiastic advocate of our book. On days when we were tired and discouraged and wondered why we had set ourselves to this task, his interest helped remind us that there’s a need for what we’re offering and the way we’re offering it. Without this encouragement, completing this book would have been much harder. Also, we’d like to thank Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas for writing the new foreword, inviting us to speak, and providing their strong support.