I come to the R party through a somewhat unusual route.
After writing a dissertation in abstract probability theory, I spent the early years of my career as a statistics professor—teaching, doing research, and consulting in statistical methodology. I was one of about a dozen professors at the University of California, Davis who founded the Department of Statistics at that university.
Later I moved to the Department of Computer Science at the same institution, where I have since spent most of my career. I do research in parallel programming, web traffic, data mining, disk system performance, and various other areas. Much of my computer science teaching and research involves statistics.
Thus, I have the points of view of both a “hard-core” computer scientist and of a statistician and statistics researcher. I hope this blend enables this book to fill a gap in the literature and enhances its value for you, the reader.