Is there a freely available canonical reference for the standard R modeling paradigm

Question

Bates, Mächler, Bolker, & Walker (2015)

[assume] familiarity with the standard R modeling paradigm

and cite a book (Chambers & Hastie, 1993, Chapter 4) as a reference. Is there a freely available canonical reference for specifying models in R?

• Bates, D., Mächler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1).
• Chambers, J. M., & Hastie, T. (1993). Statistical Models in S.

Answer 1

Chapter 11 of An Introduction to R, which should also be available to you from within your R installation under the Help menu, is about "Statistical models in R". This is very fundamental and should be what Bates et al. have in mind.