7 Courses To Learn R Programming For Beginners

Besides Python, programming language R is extremely popular with data scientists. As of June 2021, R ranked 14th in the TIOBE index. 

R is used to analyse both structured and unstructured data, making it a popular programming language for performing statistical operations. Additionally, it has a huge and constantly expanding community with a humongous respiratory of ideas, innovations and solutions for complex problems. It offers cross-platform compatibility, enabling users to select operating systems, hardware and software configurations based on their choice. 

Today, we take a look at some exciting R courses for beginners:

Statistics and R 

Offered by Harvard University, this is an introductory course to basic statistical concepts and R programming. By taking this course, learners will learn about random variables, distributions, inference of p-values and confidence intervals, and nonparametric statistics. 

The online course focuses on the use of visualisation techniques to explore new data sets and describe robust statistical techniques as alternatives when data do not fit assumptions required by standard approaches. After completing the course, learners will learn using R scripts to analyse data and the basics of conducting reproducible research. 

This intermediate-level course is four-weeks long, requiring a learner to take two to four weeks of time commitment every week. 

For more information, click here. 

R Programming A-Z

Created by Kirill Eremenko, this course teaches one about the core principles of programming, creating variables, understanding normal distribution, and practicing working with financial data in R. Additionally, it also teaches about advanced visualisation with GGPlot2. 

Spread across eight sections and 82 lectures, the course takes 10 hours and 39 minutes to complete. It requires no prior experience to take this course, and it is designed for all skill levels, and can also be taken by people with no programming or statistical background. 

For more information, click here.

R Programming: Johns Hopkins University 

Offered by Johns Hopkins University, this intermediate level course teaches how to use R for effective data analysis and is available on Coursera. One will learn how to install and configure software necessary for a statistical programming environment and describe generic programming language concepts. 

On completing the course, learners will learn programming in R, reading data into R, accessing R packages, writing R functions, debugging, profiling R code, organising and commenting R code. 

The course takes approximately 57 hours to complete and requires one to have familiarity with regression. It is delivered by Roger D Peng, Jeff Leek and Brian Caffo. 

For more information, click here. 

R For Data Science: Lunchbreak Lessons

Lunch Break Lessons by LinkedIn offers a R programming course for data scientists. This beginner-friendly course can be learnt in small bits (five minutes each week) and helps a learner build on their basic concepts. 

By taking this course one will get to review the programming language basics, discover methods to improve existing R code, explore new features and learn about useful development tools and libraries. 

Offered by Mark Niemann-Ross, the course consists of 14 chapter quizzes and offers a certificate on completion. 

For more information, click here. 

Learn R 

Offered by Codecademy, this course exposes a learner to the fundamental programming concepts in R. Besides the basic introduction, one will learn about organising, modifying and cleaning data frames in R. Additionally, a learner will learn how to create data visualisations, showing insights in data. 

After taking the Learn R course, one will learn about data frames, data cleaning, fundamentals of data visualisations, aggregates, joining tables, me, quartiles, quantiles, and interquartile, and hypothesis testing. 

One need not know how to code to take this course. It takes 20 hours to complete and one will receive a certificate once the course is completed. 

For more information, click here. 

R for Beginners

R for beginners dives into the essentials of the programming language and teaches one how to create their first R script and R project folder. It will help a learner differentiate between data structures, use built-in functions to manipulate data structures, reshape, access elements and convert R objects.  

After the completion of this course, one will master building scatterplots, line charts, histograms, box plots, bar charts, mosaic plots, alternating default graphical parameters, and exporting a figure from R. 

The course is spread over eight sections, 79 lectures and takes around 14  hours to complete. It requires no prior knowledge, and is delivered by Marko Intihar, Data Scientist and Researcher. It is available on Udemy. 

For more information, click here.

Learn R From Scratch 

Spread over 83 lessons, eight quizzes and 20 challenges, this course offered by Educative requires no prior knowledge of R and is beginner-friendly. 

By taking this text-based interactive course, one will start with the very basics of R programming, moving up to advanced concepts like exception handling. On completion of this course, the learner would be able to write detailed and useful code in R. Additionally, the built-in assessment throughout the course will enable one to assess their progress and test their skills. 

For more information, click here.