In September 2019, in my third year I did a unit known as scientific computing, where I was introduced to R programming language. In 2020,schools were closed due to the COVID-19 lockdown,a few months shy of my completion.I started looking into what I can learn and do.A friend reached out to train R for data science and I took up the responsibility.
To train you have to learn first and that's what I did ,I started learning R with videos then I realized books were the best way for me learn.I downloaded several books and I got more interested in R.I am going to breakdown some of the reasons I enjoy R .
My career interest
I wanted to get into the data science field and after my exposure to R ,I couldn't think of another way to start.Data science is a career that is related to my undergraduate studies of mathematics and I wanted to make my studies count in my career.R provided that gateway for me.
What is R?
R is a programming language and free software environment for statistical computing.
R studio Interface
The R studio interface is very easy to navigate and fun to use. It is divided into four panes the source pane,console pane,the environment pane and the miscellaneous pane.This was essential in my learning and appreciation of R,mainly because it gives the comfort of everything being on one place.
R packages
This are extensions to the R statistical programming language.They contain code, data, and documentation in a standardized collection format that can be installed by users of R. As of June 2019, there were over 14,000 packages available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network, or CRAN, which is the public clearing house for R packages.
Using this packages has been fun since am able to perform various operations such as sentiment analysis,text mining and so forth.Imagine analyzing your twitter data.R made that very easy for me to do.
Visualization of data
R has a package known as ggplot2 that is used to visualize data,it has a lot of extensions that produce different types of graphics.Click ggplot2 extensions to see those extensions .This has been very intriguing to me and I cannot wait to explore more extensions .
Applied statistics
R is good for developing statistical tools,it allows us to perform statistical operations such as linear regression,analysis of variance e.t.c.This really attracts me to R ,since there are some of the topics I am handling in my mathematics course.
R is very interesting, it has literally swept me off my feet and on a daily basis I learn something new.There's this notion that it's good to master one language at a time,and for me R is a language I intend to master.Learning is not easy,it's a curve that hardly starts on a high note,but i believe the more you practice and share the more you will learn even when you don't feel like.
Follow me on LinkedIn to see when am training R or YouTube to see my past sessions.