

Learn R two minutes at a time - bsg75
http://www.twotorials.com/

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vasco
I never knew tutorials could be so fun. I really enjoy the fact that he is
quick about it too, most screencasts usually are so slow that it is a pain to
follow.

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johnohara
Reminds me of the SlapChop video. (not a shameless plug)

<https://slapchop.com/>

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nuttendorfer
Why is this advertisement working on me? I'm usually resistant to ads but I
really want to buy this.

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jodrellblank
I don't know. But how often do you "not have time to make breakfast", but have
a peeled hard boiled egg, washed topped and tailed green onion and unpacked
chopped ham ready?

Or you "hate making salad", but right there - peeled washed topped and tailed
carrots, topped tailed and washed radishes, prepared celery. And no leaves.

The chopping and mixing bit is a fun bit of making salad, it's all the washing
and preparing which takes the majority of the time.

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dave1619
This is great. I love the concept of 2 minutes... it forces the author to
really be concise and get to the point.

Anybody know of any tutorials like this for web programming (javacript, rails,
or python)?

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oops
The <http://www.destroyallsoftware.com> screencasts are great. A bit longer
but still nice and dense. Both Ruby and Python plus other random stuff.
Totally worth a look if you haven't already seen them.

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gaving
<http://www.screenr.com/7wp8>

what... just happened

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aw3c2
Just downvoted you because I visited the site, only say the short text (I dont
use Flash nor do I browse with JS enabled) and it looked like spam so I
downvoted. Sorry. Your post here was not too verbose so it mislead me.

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sesqu
I was very hesitant as well, but eventually determined it was a relevant link
(a screencast with impressive video quality, but less impressive content).

GP's comment could certainly be improved.

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alister
I might be interested in learning R if I knew what it was. Even the webpage
doesn't explain what it is until you watch one of the videos.

I see this all the time on software-related websites. They launch into the
technical details without even one sentence about what it is. I could give a
whole bunch of examples here but I think everyone has experienced this.

Please include something like the following on the webpage and--if there's
space--in the headline too:

"R (a programming language for statistics)"

I don't mean to single out the guy who did these great tutorials. I mean this
for everybody. If your software product/OS/service/language is not Photoshop,
Linux, Google, or Java, then write a couple of words _right at the top_ to
explain what it is please.

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aggronn
Unless you're doing in-depth statistical analysis, there's not really any
reason to know anything about R. It isn't a useful general purpose language.

That is to say, while your suggestion is certainly valid and appreciable, the
reason why there are rarely primers for content about R (specifically) is that
the intended audience is primarily academic, where the audience is already
familiar with the technology. if you take an applied statistics class, you'll
learn how to use R there.

If you're not already in the club, there isn't much reason for you to join it
unless you're leaving industry to do scientific-level statistical analysis.

This isn't me saying "Mind your own business!". I'm just giving the
perspective of the writers for most R content.

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h84ru3a
But couldn't R have applications in business (industry)?

A businessperson once asked me about R after he read a non-technical article
about it in a major newspaper. This person has never been in academia. Why was
he curious? What could he possibly see in R?

I see R as a "disruptor" to the market that SPSS has had under lock and key
for as long as I can remember. Perhaps statistics has utility outside of
academics? Maybe R can give anyone the power of something like SPSS, for free.

Now what I want to know is how to convert "screenr" into a more open format.
Can you convert to video? R is not dependent on a GUI. Maybe you could convert
to screen(1) format, along with an mp3.

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aggronn
Certainly it does. Perhaps I shouldn't have emphasized academics so much.

Anyone who does in-depth statistical analysis can use R. It is equivalent to
SPSS, SAS, and matlab in its applicability, plus its free.

People involved in 'big data' and serious analytics in business are already
using R a lot of the time. The other group of people in business who use the
closed source applications above, however, aren't as technical, and have a
pretty big roadblock ahead of them.

The issue is just a question about ease of use. There are companies out there
who offer products that compare with the above
(<http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/>), but they still cost money. The
'problem' of R in business is that there aren't any good GUI's for it that
allow you to just go menu>ANOVA>3 way factorial>[settings dialog]>Calculate
and then get there.

Of course there are a few other reasons why those other applications exist and
thrive in spite of R, but I think the limited use cases and lack of a
comprehensive GUI are its biggest roadblocks.

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alook
Regarding R for BigData, do you think R is going to continue to be a stable of
the analytical toolset as data sizes continues to grow?

I use R to prototype machine learning techniques on a small set of data, or
visualize some summary statistics. But if I want to run K-Means Clustering or
Support Vector Machine algorithms on 1,000,000,000 rows of data, I've found
that running R on Hadoop is tricky. There are some libraries out there ( for
example, RHadoop <https://github.com/RevolutionAnalytics/RHadoop/wiki/rmr> )
but they require writing your algorithm in such a manner that algorithms must
be adapted to run within map() and reduce() functions. My understanding is
that the built-in functions that make R so useful will often not adapt well to
a mapreduce algorithm.

From what I've seen, once an algorithm is prototyped in something like
R/Matlab, if the data size warrants it, it's best to re-write the algorithm in
Java MapReduce or use Apache Mahout.

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aheilbut
or C.

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redwood
I love this.. I've got to be honest, I think I could even learn to program
with tutorials like this. I'm just not very good at learning how to do active,
complex tasks, by only reading about them.

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woodall
This guy is too entertaining.

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ylem
This is hilaRious! But, seriously, I like the 2 minute format for learning--
you could just watch a bit when you had a lull during the day...

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wolframarnold
Go through all this trouble but forget to make the font size bigger and the
encoding quality such that it's actually legible? Baffling.

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freditup
I've never been a fan of video tutorials myself. They always seem to move too
slow, too fast, or some of both. Obviously videos do have some advantages over
written tutorials, but if I had a choice, I'd pick written.

I didn't actually watch any of the R tutorials, so nothing that I said above
is implying they are too fast/slow etc.

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kennethologist
I like the short, one focus per video format. Consumption is quick and
effective.

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mapleoin
Listening to the voice in this one gives me the creeps:
<http://www.screenr.com/JJp8>

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pknerd
So is it for R only?

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tferris
Awesome format, wrong language.

EDIT to downvoters: with 'wrong' I don't mean bad, just a very niche language
and it would have been nice to see such a format for a more popular or general
purpose language

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bsg75
It could be the start of a trend. Personally, I would like to see the same
thing for Lua.

