Two days ago I noted I ran through the first course of JHSPH's Data Science specialization in a handful of hours.
In fact, yesterday I did the same for the second course in the series, R Programming. But this time I didn't feel “cheated” (although that's a strong word): I found the course easy as pie because I'm an experienced programmer and I've already used R quite a lot in MIT's The Analytics Edge, however I lacked any formal(ish) introduction to the language from a computer scientist's point of view. It's not enough to know that you should type lm(x ~ y + z, data=mydata); I find it necessary to know that it's a functional language where the basic data type is the vector and where every function carries with it its own environment, with such-and-such scoping semantics.
Such an introduction needn't be long. But having it, I'm a lot more confident that I understand how R works, and therefore that I can use it correctly.
All this to say − yeah, I ran through the 4-week course in a day, but it doesn't mean it deserves its poor reviews.
No comments:
Post a Comment