
Ask HN: Recommended Courses for Introduction to R/Data Science? - deilline
Hi y&#x27;all,<p>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.<p>Cursory google searches for ratings of courses had a lot of companies advertising their own products or courses like Edureka, for instance.<p>Thanks in advance!
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altairiumblue
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/](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/](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...](http://www-
bcf.usc.edu/~gareth/ISL/ISLR%20Seventh%20Printing.pdf) \- 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](http://topepo.github.io/caret/index.html)
\- shows how to use one of the popular packages for machine learning.

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rasmus1610
DataCamp is Great.

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

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acangiano
[https://cognitiveclass.ai](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.

