DataCamp: Introduction to R Review

Introduction to R is one of several free introductory level courses offered by DataCamp--an education platform for learning data science skills with a heavy focus on interactive coding exercises. The intro to R course is the first for 23 courses in DataCamp's "Data Scientist with" career track and covers the very basics of the R programming language. No prior programming experience is necessary to take the course, so it is a good place to start for anyone interested in learning R or about programming for data science in general. DataCamp tracks your course progress automatically as you complete exercises and although successfully completing exercises will award experience points, you can get hints or view full solutions at the cost of experience to progress and doing do does not seem to have any impact whether you can complete a course and earn a certificate of completion. The expected course completion time is listed as 4 hours.


Introduction to R is split up into 6 sections: R Basics, Vectors, Matrices, Factors, DataFrames and Lists, which cover most of the basic data structures and arithmetic operations used in R. Unlike most DataCamp courses, intro to R does have any lecture videos and instead consists solely of written tutorials with accompanying programming exercises, which lets you get your hands dirty with R right away. I usually prefer courses with periodic lecture videos, but for a course on basic nuts and bolts, hands on experience is particularly important and watching someone go over ground level basics in a lecture can get slow and tedious. The instructions and exercises are well made and I didn't encounter any with solution submissions.


Introduction to R is a nice primer on the basics of the R language that provides great value for your time spent. It is a good place to start if you are interested in learning R or even if you just want to test out the DataCamp platform. A lecture video or two at the start and end of the course might be nice, if nothing else to serve as an orientation for students new to R and the DataCamp platform, but their absence doesn't really detract from the course.


I give Introduction to R 4.5 out of 5 stars: Great.