I just completed the Coursera MOOC “R Programming” by Johns Hopkins University and on which I already have written about in another recent post. I have put together some thoughts on this course while responding to a question on the courses’ forums. The question was: “How do I master R Programming. My answer:
If you want to approach R programming with this course, then this MOOC is not the easiest way. This MOOC is structured like a typical programmer’s course. There are other free courses and resources, like the udacity “data analysis with R” and the Edx “The analytics edge“, which are more example-based. Being example-based, you actually understand the basic syntax, a few structures, the use of some libraries and some techniques. Also Udemy has six short courses by professor Charles Redmond, (the first one being “R, GGPLOT and Simple Linear Regression“). I have written about these too. They are easier to go through and do not pretend to teach you functions, loops etc, but will let you understand the power of the language and how you can use it interactively. The examples are a great learning tool, which is something I feel it is missing in this course. Another free resource is the book: Advanced R Programming. You can get also a paper version on amazon.
