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Learner Reviews & Feedback for R Programming by Johns Hopkins University

4.5
stars
22,171 ratings

About the Course

In this course you will learn how to program in R and how to use R for effective data analysis. You will learn how to install and configure software necessary for a statistical programming environment and describe generic programming language concepts as they are implemented in a high-level statistical language. The course covers practical issues in statistical computing which includes programming in R, reading data into R, accessing R packages, writing R functions, debugging, profiling R code, and organizing and commenting R code. Topics in statistical data analysis will provide working examples....

Top reviews

EJ

Jul 11, 2016

Excellent course! I already knew a lot about R - but this class helped me solidify what I already knew, taught me lots of new tricks, and now I have a certificate that says I know `something' about R!

MR

May 11, 2020

Really interesting course. The interactive coding sessions with swirl are especially useful. Would be great, if you provided sample solutions for the programming assignments, in particular for week 4.

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176 - 200 of 4,720 Reviews for R Programming

By Anand K

•

Feb 10, 2016

The video lectures were engaging with interesting tidbits thrown in to make the potentially dull topic not dull. I personally liked the rhythm and pace with which Dr Peng delivered the content. Also, the swirl exercises are a critical element of this course and I often found it effective to sandwich the swirl exercises between the video and the quiz. Doing this provided an incentive to complete the swirl practice and also made the quiz/assignment less of an exercise in 'dart-throwing' and more of validating what you've learned. Overall, great course to get started with R!

By Marcelo S

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Sep 8, 2017

Excellent Course in R Programming for beginners and advanced programmers alike. The programming assignments are a bit of a leap from the course material, so be prepared to be a hacker and search for solutions in the discussion forums, and save time for those assignments if you are new to programming.

Most of the theoretical background is not provided and not the focus of the course (such as mathematical statistics, linear modeling, etc), however, the R-programming aspect of them is presented in an understandable way so that the basics come through. Thank you, Dr. Peng.

By Martijn T

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Jun 10, 2017

As a new programmer, I had to chew on this one for weeks and after looping through the video's over and over again eventually mastering it. The swirl exercises are absolutely essential, and so is the discussion forum (and uncle Google / hacking skills). Although frustrated occasionally - and watching others being frustrated or even giving up, I believe the entire course was set up brilliantly. From the assignments I liked the lexical scoping assignment the least. Would have been nice to be replaced by something little bit more encouraging.

By Christopher R

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Feb 2, 2017

I finished this last year with a good background already in R. However, this course took a lot of time, a lot of stackoverflow searching and generally a lot of work! Now that I'm a year removed from the course, I can say that it's been one of the better, more rigorous, more practical and more applicable courses i've taken. I still spend A GREAT DEAL of my time looking for answers online but now the questions and tasks are much more complex now that I've taken my programming skills to higher levels, with lots of thanks to this course!

By Deleted A

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Mar 15, 2016

The Data Science specialisation with John Hopkins University is definitely worthwhile and, as a relative novice in the area, I'd highly rate and recommend R Programming. The lecturer Mr Peng presents the information in a clear and concise way, conducting walk-throughs of different steps, and providing opportunity for practice exercises. As well, the accompanying book published by the lecturer, learning materials, mentor Mr Warren and discussion board are invaluable for beginners like myself. Thank you for a terrific course so far.

By Chuanhui L

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Sep 28, 2016

Well-organized R programming course for academic amateur with some OOP knowledge before! By simply using Rgui, th is class focuses on techniques in ABC's of R programming including not limited to basci objects, data strcuture, controlling sentences, I/O and debugging suggestions.

Personally, I take this course for job purpose, but this course falls short for industrial techniques, such as reading/outputting excel, sophiticated operation on data frame, or combining R with Python and SQL.

Hope that this comment will be useful to you.

By Volodymyr C

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Nov 23, 2018

Lectures are well-presented and programming assignments are engaging (but they took me about eight hours to do each week). Swirl was a great tool for getting to grips with how to use the functions discussed. Definitely recommend having a pen and pad with you to take notes throughout - have no idea how the course could be done without doing this. Overall, I found it an engaging and suitably-challenging course for someone new to R , and with a little tweaking of programming assignment 3, I think it could be an industry standard.

By Carolina S

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Nov 18, 2020

This course was, without any doubt, a great investment of my time and money! As long as you put enough effort, you will for sure learn a lot. The content of the videos is very clear and the practical exercises in swirl are an excellent way of putting in practice what you learn. Programming assignments 1 and 3 were a bit though, when compared with the material covered in the classes. Nonetheless, if your work hard you can complete them and you will learn more than you might have expected!!

Congratulations to the instructors :)

By Stephen E

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Dec 6, 2015

I think making this course self-paced is a great idea. This is a well put together course. My only concern is for those who have not done programming before. Maybe a prerequisite course could be recommended? I recall doing an excellent Python for beginners course recently. Personally I'm not a big fan of peer correcting, I know this is a big part of making Coursera work, but for classes like this one, I think something like SWIRL would work best. Anyway, that was my two cents. KEEP OF THE GREAT WORK, YOU GUYS ROCK! :)

By Wissam A

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Jan 11, 2017

Wonderful course, it forced me to depend on myself. I had to search, I had to read and go through lots of articles, questions, solutions and tutorials online and also, in the discussion board to solve the assignments. I believe it is the best way for someone to get knee deep and learn the language. This is exactly the methodology that should be followed in the real world. One would have to search and find solutions for any issues that are encountered. I enjoyed it and moving on to completing the specialization.

By Farhan C

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Aug 23, 2017

Amazing course! You get to learn the in-depth nuances of R-Programming. Not just that, this course makes you work really hard. You need to troubleshoot your own problems, and you find even better code, a smarter and an even more lean way of coding which is simply brilliant! If you're looking for a course that will help you grasp R Programming, I would strongly recommend going through the entire Data Science Specialization. Kudos to the Coursera and The Johns Hopkins Team for putting up this course together!

By Krish H

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May 23, 2020

It is tougher than it seems. The idioms are R are difficult to master and more time is needed. It is almost as if knowing R is a pre-requisite for this course. The forums were quite helpful. If you spend more time during the week on R and take the same problem and try to solve it in many different ways then you would get more out of it. the lexical scoping, the libraries, the syntax for efficient processing using apply, pipelines are crucial to understand R and not treat it like another procedural language

By Jeff F

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Feb 8, 2016

Excellent introductory discussions in the videos. The in-R Swirl tutorial is superb - a great way to force you to type out the basic concepts. Assignments are challenging as they leave a little ambiguity, making you get familiar with the help system and online searches. This course isn't the fastest way to get an overview of R, but it's a great way to get a little more than an overview, including some practical experience, if you're willing to put in a little time and work through some bumps.

By Shannon B

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Nov 4, 2021

This course is seriously challenging and the instructor, Roger Peng, is awesome. I think I almost broke my brain on the last two programming assignments but I stuck with it, rewatching important lecture videos and thinking through the assignments on paper and actually ended up writing code that worked (very satisfying for anyone with a problem-solving mind)! I'd definitely recommend this course to anyone like me who doesn't want to get thrown any 'soft balls' and loves a challenge :)

By Kristin P

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Dec 21, 2016

Overall, this course was fairly challenging and at times I would get frustrated, but every minute was worth it after realizing the knowledge I have gained and have been able to use in the real world. I think sometimes the assignments just kind of dive right in and there's not much hand-holding, but that can be a good thing. My only suggestion would be to extend the course from 4 to 6 weeks and spread out the material a bit, but overall, you just have to be committed and make time.

By Jorge E M O

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Apr 9, 2016

This is a fast-paced and autodidact course. You'll learn in a real life environment (unlike the incredibly boring DataCamp courses). Instead of providing exercises you must be curious and learn and look for whatever you want. The quizzes were always challenging, sometimes going beyond the course material -which is, in my opinion, a great decission-. I learned in a month what I could have learned in 3 or 4 with DataCamp.

I thank Roger D. Peng for making this course possible.

By Shamsher S

•

Jan 6, 2020

This course is very good for beginners in R language and it is highly recommended for people looking to dive into the world of Data Analytics or Machine Learning. R is very powerful language and this course from one of the reputed universities of the world, John Hopkins is one of the best out there to learn from.

The difficulty level of programming assignments is increased gradually to challenge the programmer inside you. Overall a highly recommended course for beginners.

By William E G

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Jun 15, 2020

I really liked this course. He covered the basics of the R program and gives activities with Swirl that help strengthen knowledge. As for the evaluations, the questions are to verify if the basic knowledge has been strengthened, but the assignments are quite a challenge since you are on your own which is frustrating at first, but when everything goes well it is rewarding. However assignments are very time consuming, therefore I recommend the course to people who have it.

By Gowtham B

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Nov 2, 2016

Excellent course for beginners of students aspiring data analytics as a career. It teaches us the fundamentals of R programming language with utmost clarity and challenging assignments. The discussion forums were very much helpful. Everything goes smooth if we complete the course within the stipulated time. I had a wonderful experience completing my first course in Data Science and also in Coursera. I'm looking forward to complete more courses and strengthen my career.

By Eugene V

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Sep 18, 2020

Maybe its just me that it seemed the instructor speaks very fast that I have a slow mind to comprehend the instructor is discussing. I really have to pause and rewind just to fully understand the topic. Luckily they include an interactive way of learning the topics via swirl and this is really a good idea. A student like me can immediately applied the lessons in swirl and review what is happening. All in all its a great experience learning this course. Good job.

By Francisco J D d S F G

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Aug 28, 2016

A comprehensive introduction to programming in R, for people already experienced with numerical software like MATLAB and Mathematica it should be fairly easy to grasp some of the concepts of the language.

The assignments are not difficult, though it requires the student to lookup for information in R forums, or stackoverflow.

Finally, Roger is a great instructor in my opinion - he's very calm and explains some difficult aspects of the language in a clear way.

By Joao M

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Mar 13, 2016

I must confess that this course is difficult for who is beginning programming with R, the assignments require a lot of work and they are very involved. Nevertheless, I´m extremely satisfied. The book and the lectures are very good and the quizes and exercises forces you to really understand what you are doing or you cannot pass...it is what I really wanted! Thank you Coursera and special thanks to the instructor for his great work!

By Brandon G K

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Jan 24, 2016

Wonderful course! I had never programmed in R before and this gave me all of the foundational tools I needed. It gives you just the right amount of hand-holding while also requiring you to think critically about what you've learned and what you need to use to accomplish the assignments. I highly recommend this course to anyone interested in learning R. Also, the "Swirl" library that was used for basic R exercises was fantastic.

By Emily S C

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Feb 13, 2016

I love R. This course is a great introduction to being programming in R. It is not easy, and this is the 4th time I have enrolled and will finally be completing the course (yay!). Plan to watch all videos (I watch them on 3/4 speed) and re-watch many of them for clarification. It may be easier for those with prior programming experience. Don't let week 2 get you down, do the SWIRL exercises, and ask for help from your classmates.

By Silvia L

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Apr 26, 2020

The step by step instructiona helped me to complete the course succefully. I had the best experience learning it at my own pace, and the interactive learning session was an added fun to the whole course! ! The Coursera team did a great job.

I would like to thank Coursera team for providing such a good opportunity, for sharing excellent video lectures and the swirl practica exercices helped me a lot to understand the videos.