I have been spoiled by the K&R tradition of programming books and this has made it hard for me to pick up R. When I want to pick up a language from a book what I look for in the very first place is a presentation of its lexical structure, data types, expressions, control structures etc.

The R books that I have looked at do not seem to follow the convention. They usually start with a collection of (usually quite elementary) statistical problems and intersperse it with code. Unable to find a distilled description of the language in a single location, I invariably get irritated and give up. I know, I really should be more persistent.

I understand that the language is primarily designed for statisticians, but it would be good to have a book for those who are interested in it as a programming language. I am sure there is a book like that, just that I haven't found it/them. If anyone has, would love to hear about it. Maybe "R in a nutshell" is the one, though I haven't checked it out yet.