​R statistical modeling via biologists’ dialogues

By Shinichi

​Six years ago, I wrote a course manual for biology students learning statistics using R. I wanted to publish this manual as a book, but 6 years passed since that resolution. Two months ago, I finally decided to accomplish this aim, and I am actually writing the book. I have already finished the first 2 chapters!
 
I did not want to create yet another textbook for stats (there are already a lot of good R stats books). Rather, the main reason for writing this book was my desire to join great English playwrights, like Bill Shakespeare. Yes, my stats book is a play! It is structured as conversations between 6 people. I give you an excerpt here:
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​Originally, I was planning 12 chapters (my original course manual had 7 chapters), but now I plan to have 15 chapters (and maybe plus 5 appendix chapters...). I have to update the 7 already written chapters, because R has moved on a lot. Now, we have many new super-nice packages (e.g., the tidyverse family). So, in the updated version of the book, I use ggplot2, dplyr, tidyr and readr instead of the base functions from the basic packages. I am learning so much on the way! I just found a package called ‘GGally’ (the ally of ggplot2) - it is so great! I have redrawn the original scatterplot matrix (house sparrow morphological data) with ‘ggpairs’ function instead of the ‘pairs’ function. Doesn’t it just look stunning?
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​​When will I finish? I’ve told my publisher that I want to finish the whole book by the end of year... Let me aim for that – still 13 chapters to go!