Learn R Through Examples (2020)
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Learn R Through Examples (2020)
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Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)
#2R is such a horrible language to learn. I gave up entirely and now just use rpy2 for the few things it can do that Python can't.
Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)
#3If you already know another dynamic language and want to understand R, I would recommend skipping all the intros to R based around data analysis and start with Advanced R by Hadley Wickham. It will explain all the weirdness you'll encounter right up front before it confuses you. Then you can read the data analysis tutorials and focus on the content rather than the R weirdness.
Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)
#4I consider myself a pretty experienced developer/software engineer/whatever. Decade into my career, started in iOS in Obj-C, learned Swift along the way, eventually migrated to the backend with Java/SQL, and finally found myself where I really wanted to be, embedded doing C/C++ work for a household name.
That said, about halfway through my master's about two years ago, I found myself in an intro to data mining course that was sold as an "we will teach you R". I had heard non-programmer math friends talk about what they had accomplished in R, and was excited to dive in.
Now, it didn't help that the class ended up being heavy on the statistics side (which despite a math/cs double major, stats was never my thing), but the actually learning R part was 99% left as an exercise to us alongside of the classwork required.
I can say without a doubt, learning R is the worst programming experience I've ever had. Our assignments would give some high level direction on which libraries to use, but getting the right libraries setup and in the environment was just an absolute nightmare. All I remember from that class is hours every week googling unreadable python pukes from R studio (because apparently everything data mining/ML related in R is actually just python), and then spending an hour or less actually doing the statistics work.
I feel bad because I feel like I was setup to not be able to give it a fair chance, but if that's what non-programmer math types are subjected to when told "you need to do some programming for your job", I can understand the apprehension.
Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)
#5R's such a fantastic language and is leagues ahead of all others for data work.
I do however recommend picking up data.table along the way because that is easily one of the best reasons to continue using R today.
Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)
#6I consider myself a pretty experienced developer/software engineer/whatever. Decade into my career, started in iOS in Obj-C, learned Swift along the way, eventually migrated to the backend with Java/SQL, and finally found myself where I really wanted to be, embedded doing C/C++ work for a household name. That said, about halfway through my master's about two years ago, I found myself in an intro to data mining course…
> All I remember from that class is hours every week googling unreadable python pukes from R studio (because apparently everything data mining/ML related in R is actually just python)
I’m curious what libraries you were using, I’ve had to go into the source of quite a few popular libraries and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered Python. Lots of C and it’s derivatives, lots of Stan and FORTRAN, but I don’t think I’ve seen Python yet.
Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)
#7I consider myself a pretty experienced developer/software engineer/whatever. Decade into my career, started in iOS in Obj-C, learned Swift along the way, eventually migrated to the backend with Java/SQL, and finally found myself where I really wanted to be, embedded doing C/C++ work for a household name. That said, about halfway through my master's about two years ago, I found myself in an intro to data mining course…
What you described is a common phenomenon in stats / data mining / psychometrics / econometrics. They all need students to use certain programing languages, such as SAS / Stata / R / Python, but they don't really spend time to teach those programing languages. I guess this could also be the same for MATLAB in math?
Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)
#8I consider myself a pretty experienced developer/software engineer/whatever. Decade into my career, started in iOS in Obj-C, learned Swift along the way, eventually migrated to the backend with Java/SQL, and finally found myself where I really wanted to be, embedded doing C/C++ work for a household name. That said, about halfway through my master's about two years ago, I found myself in an intro to data mining course…
I pretty much had the same experience with R. I've never been able to get really productive with it as a software developer. I feel like I know too much and can't break from old habbits.
It's very academic which I feel really holds it back from software devs and also captures non developers in it's web.
Whilst it's certainly got some runs on the board. I think having data science folk work in more standard languages would actually make supporting them and their needs easier.
Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)
#9If you already know another dynamic language and want to understand R, I would recommend skipping all the intros to R based around data analysis and start with Advanced R by Hadley Wickham. It will explain all the weirdness you'll encounter right up front before it confuses you. Then you can read the data analysis tutorials and focus on the content rather than the R weirdness.
I was quite surprised how easy that book was to read and understand. I’d expected “advanced” any language to be much more difficult.
Re: Learn R Through Examples (2020)
#10I recently tried to migrate my R code to Julia. Even though I already knew R data.table is faster than DataFrames.jl, I was totally blown away by how slow Julia is. So I quickly gave up. I think I will have to write unavoidable hard loop in cpp, which I really don't want to do...