The R Book, 2nd Edition

The R Book, 2nd Edition is a nice read and resource just four chapters in. It is new to me to find a resource that poses so many examples of things you want to accomplish with links for explanations how, instead of presenting a core of functionality and letting you choose how yourself. Definitely a “read-as-you-need” book, and the first chapter even explains how best to utilize it in that manner.
Addendum: 2014-08-23T11:15:48-0500
Chapters 1-5 seem to be about R proper, and everything else is about applied statistics.

Key data points

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

Richard Hamming

Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.

George E. P. Box

Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.

Clifford Stoll

Some good projects or courses of study for R

How to install R on OSX 10.9 Mavericks as of 2014-06-01T19:29:55-0500

Here is how to install R on OSX 10.9 Mavericks as of 2014-06-01T19:29:55-0500:

brew install gcc
brew tap homebrew/science
brew install R

Details:

gcr@orion:~> gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.8.3
Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
gcr@orion:~> r --version
R version 3.1.0 (2014-04-10) -- "Spring Dance"
Copyright (C) 2014 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.2.0 (64-bit)
R is free software and comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
You are welcome to redistribute it under the terms of the
GNU General Public License versions 2 or 3.
For more information about these matters see
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

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Indenting new curly bracket blocks with smartparens for R

Emacs speaks statistics handle indentation for curly bracket blocks quite well. My preference was to have, after inserting matching opening and closing curly brackets, a newline with the cursor indented one block in. This post in particular describes the solution; it worked fine as of today.
Addendum: 2014-04-17
Here is the code snippet from the above link:

(sp-local-pair 'c++-mode "{" nil :post-handlers '((my-create-newline-and-enter-sexp "RET")))
(defun my-create-newline-and-enter-sexp (&rest _ignored)
  "Open a new brace or bracket expression, with relevant newlines and indent. "
  (newline)
  (indent-according-to-mode)
  (forward-line -1)
  (indent-according-to-mode))

Addendum: 2014-05-06
Here is a link to the documentation on using pre and post pair handlers.

Ten Simple Rules for Reproducible Computational Research

This link via irreal is another “must read” if you’ve never done systems work before (coming from a system person myself, not a data person).