Acknowledgment

I would like to thank the readers and reviewers of the first edition and it is their constructive criticism that a second edition has been possible. The R and Python open source community deservers a huge applause for making the software so complete that it is almost akin to rubbing a magical lamp.

I continue to express my gratitude to all the people mentioned in the previous edition. My family has been at the forefront as always in extending their cooperation and whenever I am working on a book, they understand the weekends would have to be spent on the idiot box.

Profs. D. D. Pawar and V. A. Jadhav were my first two Statistics teachers and I learnt my first craft from them during 1996-99 at Department of Statistics, Science College, Nanded. Prof. Pawar had been very kind and generous towards me and invited in March 2015 to deliver some R talks from the first edition. Even 20 years later they are the flag-bearers of the subject in the Marathawada region and it is with profound love and affection that I express my gratitude to both of them. Thank you a lot, sirs.

It was a mere formal dinner meeting with Tushar Gupta in Chennai a month ago and we thought of getting the second edition. We both were convinced that if we work in sync, do parallel publication processing, we would finish this task within a month. And it has been a roller-coaster ride with Menka Bohra, Snehal Kolte, and Dharmendra Yadav that the book is a finished product in a record time. My special thanks to this wonderful Packt team.