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Try R — A new online course, for free

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Re: Try R — A new online course, for free

#3
Thanks. I was sorely disappointed yesterday when I found out that Coursera classes follow a strict schedule (and that I couldn't look at the material right then) and that I wouldn't be able to try the Data Analysis with R course on their site.

I'll definitely check this out :).

Re: Try R — A new online course, for free

#7
This is great. I've nearly completed a class at UC Berkeley which was almost entirely in R and I can say with certainty that it is a marvelous language. It is powerful, concise, and has an incredibly robust community. I've experimented with many programming languages, but I have not used one which allows you to experiment as rapidly as R.

I'm currently going through the Codeschool lessons to see if there is anything that I may have missed in my class. So far so good!

Edit: The most important thing that I didn't see covered in the course was RStudio. Considering that R is more of a scripting language that a programming language, I've found that RStudio is instrumental is using the language to it's full capacity. While it's certainly possible, and in some cases optimal, to use R from the command line, my experience is that the GUI features of R studio are incredibly powerful. The ability to browse data frames and have graphs show up in the context of your work has been very useful for exploring and understanding data. Otherwise, the course does a pretty decent job introducing readers to the language and it's data strcutures.

Re: Try R — A new online course, for free

#8
Section 2.1 contains the following instruction

   "Try creating a vector of numbers, like this:"
So I typed c(5, 9, 11) and got an error message.

They meant

   "Type the R code to create this vector:"
I shall work through the rest in a few days, nice environment.
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