Superb book
It is hard to imagine a software book that beats this one. Sarkar has shown huge technical skill
in his development of the lattice package for R, and in this book he spells out how anyone with
the time and inclination can become proficient in using the package creatively. This book is
simply superb: well organized, comprehensive, and refined, with attention to the details of
coding that seem often to anticipate every question that the user is likely to have. If you care
about visualization and graphics, and use R, then you cannot go wrong in acquiring this book.
A must for users of lattice graphics
I share the views of the previous reviewers: this book is great. I have been using R for several years now, and found the help pages for Lattice much too terse to really grasp the potential of the system. This books is loaded with examples, ranging from easy to quite involved, and the explanations given are clear and to the point.
A book like this deserved a production effort from Springer, and about three times as many color plates as it has, but even as it is seems to me quite good.
Aside from the description of the Lattice package, that Deepayan Sarkar obviously knows as only its designer can, there is a wealth of comments on graphics design and pointers to the classics of the subject --Tufte, Cleveland, etc.
A book not to miss by any seriously interested in statistical graphics, or indeed by anyone willing to add a powerful tool to his/her graphics toolbox. May I only add that those willing to make a further investment of time to obtain the most of this book, might consider Murrell's "R Graphics" (Chapman & Hall), also a masterpiece of expository writing, discussing (in its chapter 4) Lattice graphics within the context of grid ---grid being the underlying graphics model on which Lattice is built.
Very helpful
I learned far more from a few hours of reading this book than I did from countless hours tinkering with Lattice graphs. I would recommend it without hesitation to any novice or intermediate user of R.
Furthermore, while both are helpful, this book is probably a better first purchase than R Graphics (Computer Science and Data Analysis).
Outstanding
Deepayan Sarkar won a prize for programming Lattice. He deserves another for writing this book. The usual style of help files in R (including Lattice) is terse; this is a deliberate choice by the developers. Presumably, a lot of people like this terseness - but I am not one of them, and there are many others I know of who share my confusion at some of the help files.
Now, there's a whole book on Lattice, and it's written in an accessible style that will let me use Lattice much more creatively and with many fewer errors.
I think even experts on Lattice may find new things here; but for newcomers to Lattice, it's an indispensable guide.
