My Favorite R Programming Course

Note: This article includes affiliate links. Meaning at no cost to you (actually, you get a discount, score!) I will receive a small commission if you purchase the course.

I've been using R since 2004, long before the Tidyverse was introduced. I knew I'd benefit from fully getting up to speed on the newest packages and functionality, and I finally decided to take the plunge and fully update my skills. I wanted a course that was going to cover every nook and cranny in R. My personal experience learning R had been pasting together tutorials and reading documentation as I needed something. I wanted to be introduced to functions I may not need now, but may have a use case for in the future. I wanted everything.

I've known for a while that the Tidyverse was a massive improvement over using base R functionality for manipulating data. However, I also knew my old school skills got the job done. I have now seen the light. There is a better way. It wasn't super painful to make the move (especially since I'm familiar with programming) and the Business Science's "Business Analysis with R" course will take you from 0 to pretty dangerous in 4 weeks.

For the person with no R experience who doesn't want to bang their head on the wall for years trying to get to a "serious R user" level. I highly recommend this Business Science's "Business Analysis with R" course. Don't let the name fool you, the course spends 5 hours of using the parsnip package for machine learning techniques. And more importantly, how to communicate those results to stakeholders.

The course was thorough, clear, and concise.

Course Coverage

General:

The course takes you from the very beginning:

• Installing R
• Setting up your work environment
  • full disclosure, I even learned new tips and tricks in that section
• and then straight into a relevant business analysis using transactional data

This course "holds your hand" on your journey to becoming self-sufficient in R. I couldn't possibly list everything in this article that is covered in the course, that would make no sense. However, the most life changing for me were:

• regex using stringr
  • Working with strings is a different world in the Tidyverse compared to base R. I can't believe how much more difficult I had been making my life
• working with date times using lubridate
  • The beginning of my career was solely in econometric time series analysis. I could have used this much earlier.
• formatting your visualizations
  • This is another area where I have lost significant hours of my life that I'll never get back through the process of learning R. Matt can save you the pain I suffered.

All of the material that I would have wanted was here. All of it.

Modeling & Creating Deliverables:

Again, do not let the title of the course fool you. This course gets HEAVY into machine learning. Spending 5 HOURS in the parsnip library (it's the scikit learn of R).

The course goes through:

• K-means
• Regression & GLM
• tree methods
• XGBoost
• Support Vector Machines

And then teaches you how to create deliverables in R-markdown and interactive plots in Shiny. All in business context and always emphasizing how you'll "communicate it to the business". I can't stress enough how meticulous the layout of the course is and how much material is covered. This course is truly special.

How many tutorials or trainings have you had over the years where everything looked all "hunky dory" when you were in class? Then you try to adopt those skills and apply them to personal projects and there are huge gaping holes in what you needed to be successful. I have plenty of experience banging my head on the wall trying to get things to work with R.

Things You'll Love:

• Repetition of keyboard short-cuts so that I'll actually remember them.
• Immediately using transactional data to walk through an analysis. You're not only learning R, you're learning the applications and why the functions are relevant, immediately.
• Reference to the popular R cheatsheets and documentation. You'll leave here understanding how to read the documentation and R cheatsheets - and let's be honest, a good portion of being a strong programmer is effective googling skills. Learning to read the documentation is equivalent to teaching a man to fish.
• Matt has a nice voice. There, I said it. If you're going to listen to something for HOURS, I feel like this a relevant point to make.

For the beginner:

• Instruction starts right at the beginning and the instruction is clear.
• Code to follow along with the lecture is crazy well organized. Business Science obviously prides itself on structure.
• There is no need to take another R basics course, where you'd repeat learning a bunch of stuff that you've learned before. This one course covers everything you'll need. It. Is. Comprehensive.
• e-commerce/transactional data is an incredibly common use case. If you're not familiar with how transactional data works or you've never had to join multiple tables, this is fantastic exposure/a great use case for the aspiring data scientist.
• A slack channel with direct access to Matt (course creator) if you have any questions. I didn't personally use this feature, but as a newbie it's a tremendous value to have direct access to Matt.

I'm honestly jealous that I wasn't able to learn this way the first time, but the Tidyverse didn't even exist back then. Such is life.

The course ends with a k-means example with a deliverable that has been built in R-markdown that is stakeholder ready. This course is literally data science demystified.

In Summary:

Maybe I'm too much of a nerd. But seeing a course this well executed that provides this much value is so worth the investment to me. The speed of the transformation you'll make through taking this course is incredible. If this was available when I first started learning R I would have saved myself so much frustration. Matt Dancho (owner of Business Science) was kind enough to give me a link so that you can receive 15% off of the course. Link

The 15% off is an even better deal if you buy the bundle, but to be honest I haven't taken the 2nd course yet. I certainly will! And I'll definitely write a review afterwards to let you know my thoughts. Here is the link to the bundle: Link

If you're feeling like becoming a data science rockstar, Matt launch a brand new course and you're able to buy the 3 course bundle. The new course is "Predictive Web Applications For Business With R Shiny": Link

If you take the course, please let me know if you thought it was as amazing as I did. You can leave a testimonial in the comment or reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear your experience!