Reddit mentions of The R Book

I really like The R book as it teaches you stats at the same time as teaching R. However, opinions on Amazon differ wildly, so I'd check a copy in your local bookstore before buying.

1. The R Book is probably the most widely used text for beginners, but if you know what types of data you will be working with and the types of analyses you want to run, there are more specific texts that can help walk you through. On the other hand, there are a ton of online resources you can access for free. The only time I've bought a book for R was for timeseries analysis. I bought it because I needed an introduction to the topic and it was handy having the accompanying script being written in R.
   
   
2. R works perfectly fine with both mac and windows. Unlike most people, though, I prefer not to use RStudio. To me it's just easier to keep everything organized by use the developer's console and writing and organizing my output in Notepad++.
   
   For hardware demands, large datasets won't be as big of an issue as model complexity, but given that modern computing demands keep going up, I think 16 GB should be standard for anyone getting a new computer. You'll be less likely to need to make an upgrade in the near future when OS and other software demands require you to do so. The bigger thing to consider is the read/write speed of your hard drive, so definitely go with an SSD. This will also help with power consumption and durability. For your CPU, R doesn't default to using multiple cores, so you'll want to look at single-core benchmarks when picking out your machine. With that being said, R does use multiple threads on a single core, so I wouldn't settle for an i5. But if you're using MCMC, a multicore CPU can be a lifesaver since you can assign your chains to run on different cores in parallel.
   
   I hope that helps. Good luck with your purchase!

I recommend you to first study probability theory, (formal definitions, variable independence, moments, limit theorems, and some distributions) this is my favorite course, but it's in spanish http://lya.fciencias.unam.mx/lars/0625/, then I recommend this course in MIT: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-041sc-probabilistic-systems-analysis-and-applied-probability-fall-2013/ it's going to take you a couple months to finish it, it's a lot of material, you can complement the material with this course http://oli.cmu.edu/courses/free-open/statistics-course-details/ (it has some r exercises). and in the road, try to make all the ocw homeworks on r, using Rmd, and some latex. Use the R book as a reference http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Michael-J-Crawley/dp/0470973927

Learning R, is more about learning the math behind probability and the basic concepts of statistics than learning the language.

Assuming your speaking of the statistical language "R," I cannot recommend anything. I have never used "R." But here is Amazon's top result: http://www.amazon.com/The-Book-Michael-J-Crawley/dp/0470973927

tl;dr: I am not helpful. Sorry OP.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0470973927