Learning R for data manipulation and data analysis: Guide to Non-programmers
Hello! If you have landed on this blog, I am pretty sure you come from a non-programming background and are considering the option whether to learn R or not. After all R is a programming language and you don’t know even the basics of programming! You are having self- doubts if you can learn this skill or not.
Let me tell you, I have personally overcome this fear of learning R and now I am a confident user of R. I must admit I am still learning, and I consciously make it a habit to learn new ways of doing things in R each day.
I look back on my journey with learning R and it’s been haphazard way how I started with it. Looking back, I can say I wasted a lot of time in just figuring the resources and right tutorials for me. Below is a brief overview of how I started. I recommend a few courses which can help you fuel your learning in R. Hope you find it useful.
- I read some articles online which said Excel is dead! Time to learn R etc. Boost your productivity by learning R etc. I was interested to know more about R.
I started watching you tube videos on R to get a hang of the tool and try to gauge what all I could accomplish with the tool. At first it was way too overwhelming, but I kept watching the videos for a few weeks.
2. Then I realized I need some focused videos covering A-Z of R. So, I joined a couple of courses in Udemy (most of these courses where 10 dollars, and as I was just starting to learn this skill, I did not wanted to invest a big amount). I took about 6 courses in R there and believe me each of them were unique is some way. I could relate with what the instructors taught to help me at my daily work in excel. While I was taking these courses, I was very picky on what is useful to me and what is not. Trust me, you only need to learn what you can directly and immediately apply to work. What I am trying to say here is, you may just need 20% of the content from that course. But this learning when applied at work, will make you 10X efficient.
3. I wanted to learn more! Somehow, I felt I needed a new course 😊 This is where I landed on Business Science University . It’s Business Analysis with R -101 is THE course you need to become proficient in R. I highly recommend it. The course is up to date. Most of the course in Udemy which I did had base R. Good that I learned that too, but if you are under a time constraint, you may get started with the R-101 course directly and save a lot of time.
With all the courses I took to learn R, I have just applied 20% of what I have learned. But my productivity and efficiency has improved 10X. I would encourage you to start your journey in R. Getting started is the key. Explore several tutorials and try to sieve what is relevant to your work. It will immensely help you in your data analytics journey.
I have compiled a list of my most often used R codes which I use at my work. Will share that in my next blog.
