And now I remember why I wanted to learn R over summer break. This book assumes at least a passing familiarity with Digital Humanities (at least, it assumes that you've heard of it) and is mostly a well-curated and intriguing tour of what the Stanford Literary Lab has been up to over the past five years. Jockers' work is especially useful because he has a very clear idea of why he is doing what he is doing (which does not always come through in the shorter discussions of his work). His focus isn't just on figuring out the tools, but in asking questions about their implementation. What can I do with this and, perhaps, more crucially, how.
I found the defense of DH sections a bit tedious, but I suppose I wasn't the intended audience. My relationship with close reading is not threatened by the advent of Macroanalysis (see the bit about meaning to learn R).
What Jockers has written is, in some ways, a tool for generating interest in macroanalysis. This book is certainly not a how-to guide, but I have a difficult time imagining the kind of person who reads it and does not find herself wanting to try out some of these techniques (and then you get to the last chapter and realize that everything you are interested in is under copyright...).