Applied Econometrics with R by Kleiber and Zeileis is a welcome and timely addition to the fast-growing Use R! series of R titles published by Springer. As noted by the authors, this appears to be the rst book1 that focusses on R and econometrics. Researchers in quantitative social sciences in general, and econometrics in particular, have often favoured scripting languages such as GAUSS or Stata, or packages such as EViews.
Introducing R to this particular audience could therefore be a well-appreciated title among the growing number of publications about R. The book is comprised of seven sections. A brief introductory chapter gently guides the reader around the R environment via succinct examples that highlight several focal areas of the book. This includes the wide use of graphics for data exploration and visualization. It also covers more recent methods in applied statistics or econometrics. For example, quantile regressions are already used in the second example in the Introductory Session 1.1 and hence before the reader has reached Section 1.2, Getting Started! The chapter continues with material on how to work with R, a very brief overview of data and object types, and is followed by short sections on the help system, the development model and the history|all of which combines into a well-rounded overview.
