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Coursera's R programming

 
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There is a course happening right now in Coursera that teaches the R programming language. R is a language with which one could do some data analysis. If you are working on something Big Data, then you'd probably have come across the R programming language. Just thought of sharing this with you all. I did the course and the assignments were pretty easy.
 
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Link?
 
Joe San
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Tim Cooke wrote:Link?



Finding the course at the Coursera website should be the relatively easy. Anyways, here it is!

https://class.coursera.org/rprog-007

I would recommend doing the course. I managed to finish the entire course and all the assignments in just 6 hours. It will not make you completely familiar with R, but it just gets you started with solid understanding of the core language.
 
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I did this course too, but I thought it was pretty much a waste of time - poorly structured, weird choice of topics, incoherent and not very well taught. The estimates of hours per week were unreliable, because they didn't include the coursework. I got 100% but I didn't really learn anything useful, I just wasted some sunny weekend hours when I could have been having a lot more fun!

If you want to learn about R and data analysis in a more structured and constructive manner, I think the following course looks much more promising (started this week):

https://www.coursera.org/course/statistics

The course seems to cover how you do data analysis in R, and the course team seem very committed to promoting open education in statistics. And the course tutor has already confirmed that the estimated hours should include all the work to complete the course, although as always with Coursera you should probably allow a bit extra.
 
Joe San
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You are in a sense correct that it only teaches the basics of R and not about data analysis. The weekly assignments were focused on reading and interpreting some CSV files which was pretty easy. The course is purely a beginners material.

I will look into the other course that you mentioned.
 
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Thanks for this information.

By the way when we use R language ? By data analysis what is the meaning ?
Why cannot it be done with JAVA ? What is the need of new Language at first place ?
 
chris webster
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Joe Harry wrote:You are in a sense correct that it only teaches the basics of R and not about data analysis. The weekly assignments were focused on reading and interpreting some CSV files which was pretty easy. The course is purely a beginners material.


Actually I don't think it was much help to beginners either. When I did it there were a lot of people who had never programmed before, who seemed to be having real problems, and a lot of people who seemed to be attempting the course for the second time, which suggests the course is failing to get a lot of people up to speed first time around. The choice of topics was bizarre e.g. we looked at lexical scoping and memoisation, but we never touched R's excellent graphing tools. For experienced developers like you and me, this is not a problem, but the course is not aimed at experienced developers. The course tutor does not come from a CS background, and I don't think he has ever learned programming in any structured fashion, which is probably why he doesn't seem able to teach it in a structured fashion either. Being fluent in a language does not necessarily mean you are able to teach that language, whether the language is R, Java or French.

To be honest I learned more R by spending an hour or so on Try R and reading some online tutorials. But YMMV of course!

Another particular issue with R is that unlike most other programming languages, it was largely invented and developed by maths people, not CS people. So it looks a bit odd compared to other programming languages, and can seem a bit random in its structure and libraries. It's a fully featured programming language with powerful libraries, but its real strengths are in statistics and maths. I know people who've written web applications in R, but I think that was mainly because they didn't know any other programming languages! If you want to make best use of R, I think you also need to know a bit about statistics and data analysis, so you can appreciate what R provides. That's why I think learning R alongside some basic statistics might be helpful for people who may not have much of a stats background, for example. And if you already have good stats knowledge and have already programmed before, then I'd say go and get a good book on R and learn it yourself instead.

As for R and Big Data, that seems to be kind of a mixed bag. The basic R installation is not much use for big data, because it has to load all its data into memory. However, there are libraries to help with this e.g. the ff libraries to process data on disk, and various other options for parallel processing etc. There are R interfaces to things like Hadoop, and Oracle is pushing some of its own R interfaces. I haven't really had a chance to look at these yet, as I've decided to use Python, Hive or Spark for the relatively straightforward data analysis I need to do at work, as these tools are more flexible and (in the case of Spark) potentially more powerful for our purposes, although some of my statistician colleagues are looking at R and ff.

And coming back to statistical knowledge, this is actually important when doing data analysis on big data, because you need to have an understanding of how to choose the right tools and techniques to suit your data, and whether you can draw particular conclusions based on that data analysis.
 
chris webster
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Sangel Kapoor wrote:Thanks for this information.

By the way when we use R language ? By data analysis what is the meaning ?
Why cannot it be done with JAVA ? What is the need of new Language at first place ?


  • Go to the Statistics course I mentioned above.
  • Sign up for the free option.
  • Work through the first week's materials which are online now.

  • This will introduce you to the basic concepts of data analysis - sampling, simple statistics etc - and if you find it interesting, you can follow the rest of the course and learn some statistics and R at the same time.

    R is not a "new" language - it's been around since the 1990s. It was designed specifically for statistical data analysis, so it provides a lot of stats-related tools. It was aimed at working statisticians who want to explore and analyse their data in different ways, so it has an interactive command-line interface - a REPL - but can also be used to write large applications. It has been widely used by data analysts and statisticians for many years, but seems to be gaining popularity with the emergence of the "data scientist" role i.e. people who can combine traditional statistical skills with computer programming.

    Of course, you can use Java to do the same things, but you'd probably need to track down a lot of specialised libraries to provide the same range of functionality and interactivity, or write your own. R already does all this, has lots of powerful and mature libraries, is widely used and generally quite well documented. If you need to do the kind of things that R is good at, why not use it? Or choose another tool that already meets your needs, instead of re-inventing this particular wheel.
     
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