Rrrr you ready kids?

Pirate puns aside, we are stoked to introduce our first ever R course! R is not only one of the most popular programming languages for data analysis and statistics but is also an open-source interactive environment specifically designed to support data science. If you spend a lot of time slogging through Excel, it's time to learn R. To tell you more about R and how they use it everyday, meet Codecademy's very own Data Scientist Manager - Catherine.

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New Course: Learn R!   Pirate puns aside, we are stoked to introduce our first ever R course. R is not only one of the most popular programming languages for data analysis and statistics but is also an open-source interactive tool specifically designed to support data science. If you spend a lot of time slogging through Excel, it's time to learn R.   To learn more about R and how people use it in their day to day work, meet Codecademy's very own Data Scientist Manager, Catherine.   Codecademy's Data Scientist Manager - Catherine   When and why did you learn R? I moved over to R after college when I lost access to Stata (a statistics software). At the time, I was working as a data analyst and I needed to use software that was free to use. My primary motivation came after I saw examples of the data visualization and statistical modeling in R; it was beyond the capabilities of any other software I had used in the past.   What are the benefits of R over other languages? Compared to other statistical software programs, R is great because it is free and open source. Open source languages tend to be well supported with online documentation, which made it much easier for me to look up code examples. Compared to other programming languages, R has built-in functionality for statistics and a wide ecosystem of packages. This means you can do virtually any type of statistical analysis you can imagine in R. You might've heard about Python for data science. As a data scientist, it's beneficial to learn a little bit of both R and Python, but choose whichever language works best for you to get started.   How do you use R on the day to day? At Codecademy, I use R to clean and analyze our user data. We have millions of users and we use data to help us understand how to better serve our learners. I use R Studio and the packages I use most often are dplyr for data cleaning and ggplot for data visualization. R has allowed me to automate workflows, create interactive data visualizations, forecast business metrics, and detect breakages on our website.   Any tips for learning R? 1) Learn the tidyverse! This will make your code a lot cleaner and easy to read. Codecademy's Learn R course will walk you through some tidyverse code to get you started. 2) Use data that's interesting and/or meaningful to you. Using data you find interesting will make the learning process much more entertaining.   Our Learn R course covers key R syntax such as variables and vectors and how to expand the capability of your workspace by importing a package. In the second lesson, we will tackle data cleaning and wrangling - two key prerequisites for performing sound data analysis.     Looking for more? Our Pro learners get access to projects that highlight the real world applications of R. In the first lesson of our brand new course, learners will estimate the population growth of Istanbul with UN data. Our curriculum developers, Natalia and Ian, will even be doing a livestream today at 1:30pm EST, walking through the second lesson's project -- how to clean data set from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on immigrant children separated from their families on the US-Mexico border. Upgrade today to start on one of these projects. Bonus Course: Learn LOLCode!   Codecademy's Senior Product Manager's step cat coding   Happy April Fool's Day! To celebrate, we made a mini-course on an esoteric programming language called LOLCODE! Inspired by the old lolcats internet memes, this is a real programming language with catchphrases like "I CAN HAS" and "KTHXBYE" in place of traditional programming statements like print or echo. Basically, all those times your cat has been caught on the computer, they've actually been writing code. Learn with them and try out some LOLCode.     Bonus Video: What Makes an Effective Programmer Following up last week's video on how to get a job as a developer, we'll be talking about what it means to be an effective programmer. We'll be parsing through what is myth and what is the reality of programming in the real world.   P.S. Be the first to see new videos as soon as they're released: subscribe to our YouTube channel.   Happy coding, Codecademy

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