Sunday, October 06, 2013

Computing for Data Analysis

I am attempting to sharpen the saw.  I am taking a course online from Coursera, which I believe is associated with John Hopkins University called Computing for Data Analysis.  The course is turning out to be HARD!

https://class.coursera.org/compdata-003/class/index

The course assumes that I remember math from 30 plus years ago, which obviously is a bad assumption.  The course also assumes I have been exposed to statistics, which is also false.

I am learning the basics of the R programming language.  I am getting to learn RStudio.

Although it is hard, I think in the end I will have learned a tiny bit.  Let me share with you two lessons I learned today.

The runif command does not mean "run if" but "r uniforms".

Quote - "less typing is always better because good programmers are always lazy"

Please note I thought the quote was funny.  I do not believe developers are lazy.  I do support the premise that developers try to write code as simple as possible.

I will continue to tough out this course because in the end I believe I will have learned something useful and applicable.