Ask HN: Recommended Courses for Introduction to R/Data Science?

8 points by deilline 7 years ago | 3 comments

Hi y'all,

A friend of mine with a non-technical background is looking to learn R and apply it to her daily work. She has a background in statistics and clinical research but is non-technical. I was wondering if anyone on this forum has gone through any courses and their experiences with those. The reason I ask is money is a little tight for her so she is trying to do some research before she spends on it.

Cursory google searches for ratings of courses had a lot of companies advertising their own products or courses like Edureka, for instance.

Thanks in advance!

altairiumblue 7 years ago |

She really doesn't need to spend on anything. All of the good beginner resources are free:

- Hands on programming with R - https://rstudio-education.github.io/hopr/ - Teaches basic programming concepts like working with variables, if-else statements, loops etc in R. If your friend doesn't have a technical background, this is a good place to start.

- R for Data Science - https://r4ds.had.co.nz/ - Teaches you to work with the most commonly used libraries for manipulating and visualising data.

- Introduction to Statistical Learning with R - http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/ISLR%20Seventh%20Printing... - A great place to start with some of the theory. If she has a background in statistics, it should be quite accessible.

- Caret package site - http://topepo.github.io/caret/index.html - shows how to use one of the popular packages for machine learning.

rasmus1610 7 years ago |

DataCamp is Great.

Otherwise https://r4ds.had.co.nz/ is a great free book as is https://moderndive.com/

acangiano 7 years ago |

https://cognitiveclass.ai has many relevant courses and they are all available for free.

You also get a certificate of completion and an ACCLAIM-verified badge backed by IBM (so that she can put them on LinkedIn and/or her resume).

DISCLAIMER: I'm one of the founders of the project and its marketing lead.