What is the best way to learn R programming?

When you said R programming, my first thought was the Reddit programming thread.

I meant the R programming language.

Try the Coursera class on R programming. It is part of their data science specialization program.

R is a programming language for data science. Coursera is free, I believe, too.

Try reading John D. Cook’s blog on the R programming language. Most of his content is free.

But he’s hawking some books, I’m sure.

No, more than that, data analysis services. He makes way more on a job like that once in a while than a couple hundred books.

I guess that does make him an expert.

Read the inside-r.org article on the open source R project; they have information on both the R language and various tools for number crunching in R.

I’ll give them an A for thoroughness.

I give R overall an F for complexity; it’s as bad as C in that regard.

R is heavily used in the data sciences.

Python is rising as a rival to it in data analysis, and you can use Python for the web server, info graphics generation and other apps, too.

I want to learn R. I can learn Python later, if I need to.

You could try the Revolution Analytics site on R, if you need an intro to the language. You can get R open from them or buy a number of enterprise applications based on R.

I’d rather try Inside-R if they have good resources on it.

I think the best resource on it is r-project.org; that’s the homepage of the programming language and its tools.

That’s like going to Python.org to learn about Python.

If you want to learn everything about it, nothing beats going to the source and reading all the documentation.

As long as it does not put me to sleep.

Not nearly as fast as trying to do twenty variable analysis via a matrix without having Mathematica, Maple or similar software to do it for you.

That’s what R can be used for.

The R-project site has simple FAQs, detailed manuals, the R Journal on uses of the language and the occasional conference.

That would definitely be nerdier than any comic-con.

Given how much the data scientists make, they can literally laugh all the way to the bank. Speaking of data, you could try R4stats.com.

R is used for statistical analysis. Does it track how many people use the software?

It has articles on the language, how to use it like SAS and SPSS, links to the guy’s books if you want to buy them and the occasional live webinar on how to use R.