Another reviewer wrote "I suspect most practicioners use S+". He should have been at the UserR! 2004 conference in Vienna this past March, with 500 or so enthusiastic R users including many from big industry (financial, pharmaceutical). And Ripley is the number-one contributor to the R Help mailing list by a long way. So it is completely appropriate that R is so prominant. Many of us appreciate open source not only for its cost ($0) but also its transparency. The reviewer should take another look at R.
As for the book, it is my data anlysis bible. It gets me started in a correct direction, with very well-explained and worked out examples, which I then adapt to my own datasets. The writing couldn't be clearer, and the references to primary sources as well as non-computational statistics texts I have found to be excellent. This is the one book to own if you are more than a beginner.