Welcome back to my blog as we enter 2022!
Happy New Year! I hope you all had a lovely winter 💗 I know I've been a bit lazy with my blog in 2021, so for my New Year's Resolution, I will write one blog post per month and deliver consistent content for you to enjoy. As promised in my previous post "Is autism a disability?", I'm going to talk about how I ended up learning R and why some of you might find it useful (hint: data scientists and data analysts). There will be some R-related content from now on as well as Python and neurodiversity as before!
What is R?
R, like Python, is a programming language. The main difference is that instead of being able to do a bit of everything, R is mostly used for statistical analysis. It is a language developed by statisticians for statisticians. Much like most Pythonistas use Jupyter notebook as an editor, R programmers use RStudio to write code and import packages.
How I ended up learning R?
I got new job! Yup, that's right. After I finished my Master's I ended up working at a research lab involved in data science where I have to use R. Necessity is a good motivator for... everything I suppose haha.
Was it easy to learn? How hard is it?
Personally I found it fairly straightforward to learn. Already knowing Python, I was fairly comfortable with programming concepts and as someone who has been in the STEM field throughout my education the statistics wasn't too hard to grasp. It also helps that I'm a massive math nerd and did a computational project for my dissertation 😅 This was the first time that I've used a book to learn how to code. I'd say pick a book that's essentially a "Book for Dummies" that describes all the steps starting from installation of R. Of course, I tested out the codes from the book to see if it actually workers on my computer and not just read it. The thing that I've found with any kind of programming is that you just have to start and make new programs and you'll get from A to B at some point. Once I was done with the basics, I started making new codes. StackOverFlow has been particularly useful whenever I got stuck. There's always someone more experienced than you! Especially if you're just getting started.
Who would find R useful?
Most likely if you're in the data science field, R is a useful programming language to learn. R is designed for statistical calculations.
Which do I prefer: Python or R?
Long story short: it depends. If I want to do some heavy statistical analysis, calculations, or data visualizations, then I prefer R. Generally though, I prefer Python because Python codes are easier to read (especially for machine learning related codes) and it's like the "jack of all trades" kind of programming language. R is useful for reading Excel or CSV (UTF-8) files but Python can import other more "minor" types of files as well.
Final thoughts
Thanks for reading until the end of my post! Since the majority of you wanted to read a story time about me starting to learn R in a twitter poll, I decided to make a post about it. (A lot of you told me to take a break in December as well so I took your advice and resumed writing in January LOL) I haven't yet decided on next month's topic but I'll let you know via social media! In the meantime, as always, please check out my other blog posts!!
