Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
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Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
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Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#2There's not much you can actually teach to someone in an hour, especially about programming. So much of it is dependent on other computer skills...I once taught a class for five hours of introductory programming, and while some people learned things, we were frequently caught up in things like people saving filenames of "folder/hello.rb"...that is, the forward-slash was part of the filename, not the path...which I didn't even know was possible on any platform.
But what you can get across, and the OP seems to have done this, is how accessible programming can be. I don't know about RStudio, but jumping into a REPL is easy enough in any modern languages, as is running a script. We take it for granted, but very very few people who haven't programmed realize that a "program" is simply composed of text. Hell. most people don't understand that about web pages.
So even if you won't teach much in an hour, overcoming that intimidation factor of "where/how do I even start?" is still pretty huge.
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#3Nice, brief, introduction to R. If I might be so bold, I might suggest taking the Coursera "Computing for Data Analyis" class. It's only 4 weeks long and the first lesson covers everything in this blog post and more (I'm actually taking this class now). Though the first class is a bit longer than one hour (but not by much!).
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#4As an intro, its well written and documented.
If there is a fail, his sister is a senior in sociology and she "must have" already done significant statistical analysis in class... right? At the very least did some averages using her calculator in high school or something? So there should be substantial opportunity for compare/contrast, assuming his sister is compatible with this learning technique and the author knows anything about what the sister already knows. That would make a remarkably awful non-specific general population introduction.
Also some focus on what she's doing... I did not find generic screwing around with R to be particularly challenging, I found "how do I connect R to my enormous database cluster in an intelligent fast simple way" to be a huge problem when starting out. OK I can average and std dev five hand entered numbers, that's very easy, now how about a complicated multi-site relational database with 1M records? She may have a totally different challenge, like all her raw data is CSV format or something.
R is fun once you climb that vertical learning curve wall at the start and generate your first live result. The learning curve is very easy after that first result.
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#5Nice post. I've recently been trying to get back into R with the goal of being able to replace Excel. For the basic stuff R is great but as you start doing more complicated things it takes quite a while to figure out to do them in R. This is a part of the learning curve.
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#6There's not much you can actually teach to someone in an hour, especially about programming. So much of it is dependent on other computer skills...I once taught a class for five hours of introductory programming, and while some people learned things, we were frequently caught up in things like people saving filenames of "folder/hello.rb"...that is, the forward-slash was part of the filename, not the path...which I di…
RStudio is the best IDE I've ever used and I wish something like that existed for other programming languages. The default workspace is split into the script, data, terminal, and meta (files/charts/help), and selecting a data frame variable will display it in a formatted window, making it very, very easy to debug data issues (I'm attempting to switch from R to Python/pandas due to performance/package issues, and I'm having much more difficulty debugging code.)
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#7As an intro, its well written and documented. If there is a fail, his sister is a senior in sociology and she "must have" already done significant statistical analysis in class... right? At the very least did some averages using her calculator in high school or something? So there should be substantial opportunity for compare/contrast, assuming his sister is compatible with this learning technique and the author know…
The author of this piece is a woman.
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#8As an intro, its well written and documented. If there is a fail, his sister is a senior in sociology and she "must have" already done significant statistical analysis in class... right? At the very least did some averages using her calculator in high school or something? So there should be substantial opportunity for compare/contrast, assuming his sister is compatible with this learning technique and the author know…
The author of this piece is a woman.
Luckily it doesn't change my response in any way other than in addition to all the "he" translating to "the author" all the "she" should refer to "the author's sister". I'm a "he" who provided software support to my sister, so you can see the likely source of that assumption. No negative implication of her ability to successfully portray her chosen gender role intended.
Also I think its lame to check out bylines to make sure I run stuff thru the right sexism filter; I clearly stated its a "good" article; not "good, for a girl" article, or "not up to the manly standards of excellence" article.
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author of this piece is a woman.
Luckily it doesn't change my response in any way other than in addition to all the "he" translating to "the author" all the "she" should refer to "the author's sister". I'm a "he" who provided software support to my sister, so you can see the likely source of that assumption. No negative implication of her ability to successfully portray her chosen gender role intended. Also I think its lame to check out bylines to m…
It's not a byline. It's the name of the website, the name of the window when opened in Safari, it's got her picture right next to the text.
You might not have belittled her because she's a woman, but simply assuming "Programming article = male by default" is in and of itself harmful.
Re: Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour
#10There's not much you can actually teach to someone in an hour, especially about programming. So much of it is dependent on other computer skills...I once taught a class for five hours of introductory programming, and while some people learned things, we were frequently caught up in things like people saving filenames of "folder/hello.rb"...that is, the forward-slash was part of the filename, not the path...which I di…
RStudio is the best IDE I've ever used and I wish something like that existed for other programming languages. The default workspace is split into the script, data, terminal, and meta (files/charts/help), and selecting a data frame variable will display it in a formatted window, making it very, very easy to debug data issues (I'm attempting to switch from R to Python/pandas due to performance/package issues, and I'm…
RStudio is amazing - and has been key to several of my colleagues stepping away from SAS and toward R.