[R] Learning R: which book to choose?

[Jan Krupa]

I am new to R. I am going to by one of the following book:

1.
William N. Venables and Brian D. Ripley. Modern Applied Statistics 
with S-Plus.
Third Edition. Springer, 1999. ISBN 0-387-98825-4.

2.
 The  Fourth Edition of the book from point 1.

3.
`S Programming'
 by W. N. Venables and B. D. Ripley
 Springer. ISBN 0-387-98966-8, 2000.


I can only by one of the above books.

Q1.
I have found the following info at the site
http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/MASS4/ :

''The material on programming has been reduced since the first and 
second editions''

Is that also true that 
The material on programming has been reduced since the THIRD  edition?

Q2. Which of the books 1 or 2 do you suggest to buy?
I mean which one is more complete?
May be the third (3) book would be enough to learn R?

TIA

Jan

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