
R Course Finder - rexercises
http://r-exercises.com/2016/11/04/r-course-finder-update-2/
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kylebenzle
R has done more to bring non-coders into professional programming than
anything else in my opinion and I love that they are sticking to their roots
with self-paced courses.

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quickly
What are their roots? I really didn't enjoy my experiences with R, but I also
was forced to take it and have little interest in learning how to be a
statistician.

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kylebenzle
Statisticians. Sorry who I meant was the whole of academia who before had an
excuse to pass there stats work on to a statistician but now are happy
programmers.

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apathy
Keeps my consulting going ;-)

In all seriousness I've taught postdocs who were willing to learn everything
from Python to C++/MPI to assembler. The key is just to be intellectually
curious and enjoy solving problems. R is very often the thin end of the wedge
-- its learning curve is more like a wall, but once you've survived that, most
programming language quirks seem like NBD. And lord knows the real physical
world is far quirkier still.

R is ugly as shit (ok not as bad as Perl, and it is lispy enough not to be
infuriating) but it gives you an enormous arsenal of tools. It's not like R is
unique in this way, any decent programming language enables this, it's just
that R and CRAN seem to have a working implementation of most anything an
analyst is likely to need; if you need speed you call out to C++ or FORTRAN,
it's not beautiful but it gets things done. So more of your time can be spent
in the pursuit of understanding, to poke and prod, visualize your results,
solve problems and (sometimes) discover things no one else has seen.

If someone DOESN'T like those last two things, what the hell are they doing in
academia anyways? Choose another line of work and make a lot more money :-)

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IndianAstronaut
As a data analyst/engineer, if I had to pick one tool, it would be R. It
really can do just about everything data, and do it easily.

