R is a programming language that solely focuses on statistical analysis and visualization. It is used extensively by statisticians, data analysts, data scientists, and more to gain valuable insights from data. Like all programming languages, R has a learning curve that can be difficult for some. In this article, we will go through some courses that will help you develop your knowledge of R and R development best practices.
Note that the links to the following courses will bring you to various educational providers, which all have different pricing models. Some courses also may be a part of a larger certificate program, so keep that in mind as you choose courses to help you become an R developer.
General R Programming Courses
Coursera’s Data Analysis with R Programming is part of Google’s Data Analytics Professional Certificate program and takes you through the basics of R programming, with no coding experience required.
In this course, potential R developers will learn the basics of the R programming language and the R programming environment, get an overview of options for generating visualizations with R, learn the programming concepts such as how to work with data types, functions, and variables , and be introduced to basic formatting R Markdown concepts.
Meanwhile, if you are interested in taking the entire Google Analytics Professional Certificate program, you can read our article on the subject (linked below) to learn more.
Reading: Is the Google Data Analytics Professional Certificate Worth It?
Coursera’s Data Science: Foundations Using R teaches you how to think like a data scientist. The course will teach R programmers how to analyze data, clean it, and visualize information. Popular R developer tools like GitHub and RStudio will be taught as well, and students will set up those developer tools and use them to manage data science programming projects. Finally, those taking the R developer course will uncover methods to obtain data and create producible research and results.
R Programming Courses for Beginners
Swirl R Developer Course
swirl offers a unique set of courses that lets you learn R right inside the R console. Simply put, it turns the R console into an interactive learning experience, teaching you about the programming language while you get comfortable using the R development environment at the same time.
Udemy R Coding Course
R Language for Absolute Beginners is a programming course for beginners from Udemy. It teaches budding developers about the necessities of R from a beginner standing point – nothing more, nothing less. It is a very basic, introductory course that is great for first-time developers that are new to data science programming concepts in general.
Students will learn how to install R and R Studio, manipulate arrays, matrixes, vectors, and data frames, work with basic statistics, aggregate data, integrate Excel, and work with external libraries to extend the functionality of the R programming language.
Reading: Data Analytics vs Data Science: What’s the Difference?
R Developer Intermediate Courses
Another course from Udemy, the Advanced Analytics in R for Data Scienceis a deep dive into data analytics in R, which includes a practical project at the end to put your skills to the test.
Course takers will learn how to prepare data in R, work with dataframes, create custom functions, iterate over data with loops, learn a ton of R methods, and use date-times. The course is pretty extensive and by the end, R developers should have an intermediate to advanced understanding of data science programming principles in R.
Not be outdone, Coursera’s Data visualization in R with ggplot2 goes in depth with the popular data visualization package ggplot2. The R coding course targets intermediate level developers seeking knowledge about working with data in the tidyverse and, specifically, the ggplot2 library, which is used to create visualizations and vector graphics.
Other R Programming and Software Development Courses
Some other courses you should consider when deciding where to get started with R programming include Getting Started with RStudio (another Coursera offering). R uses an integrated development environment (IDE) called RStudio, which R developers will need to be very familiar with. This course teaches you all about installing R, as well as getting to know RStudio and how to install packages.
Data camps Reporting with R Markdown course is another course you should contemplate. R Markdown is an extremely useful tool when sharing reports developed in R and this course teaches you how to transform your findings in R into easy to read, shareable documents – a very important element for data scientist and data analysts to learn.
Conclusion to R Programming and Coding Courses
Thanks to hundreds of well-established packages and libraries dedicated to discovering and visualizing insights from data, the R programming language is a fantastic developer tool. While it can be intimidating at first to learn the various aspects of R, there are plenty of resources out there beyond the ones listed in this article, so we encourage coders to go out there and discover more. If you are looking to do any kind of statistics, data analysis, or data visualization, then learning at least the basics of R is highly recommended.
Reading: Top Courses for Data Analysis
