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Learner Reviews & Feedback for R Programming by Johns Hopkins University

4.5
stars
22,170 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

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.

JM

Aug 11, 2019

Very challenging, but good course. I've been programming in R for over a year, but there were still some things for me to pick up in this class. Assignments were a challenge, but satisfying to tackle.

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2901 - 2925 of 4,720 Reviews for R Programming

By Espen R

May 4, 2017

I learned a lot of the basics in R with this course.

Sometimes it is a bit of a dissonance between the lessons and the assignments, and the programming style in the lessons might seem a bit old fashioned or cumbersome, but for good reason. There are a lot of packages in R than makes you do things easy, but knowing the base is very important. The practical assignments are challenging and fun. The video lessons are good. A big minus for misleading/unclear descriptions on how to deliver your assignments. A big plus for the peer review process.

By Stephen C

Dec 13, 2018

Overall the course was excellent. The lectures were engaging and interesting. The assigments for most part were useful and easy to understand. My only reason for giving 4 stars instead of 5 stars was the 2nd assigment. We needed to use GitHub account and load things on there. I do not mind the peer graded assignment idea but it seemed difficult grading when links did not work and I had no visibility to what they truly may have been working on. I felt bad grading poorly when other peers may have worked very hard on that project.

By Kazim M

Apr 8, 2016

A very challenging course for a beginner, but if you are ready to invest time and effort, you will definitely manage it. A point that should definitely be mentioned is that the course is not self-sufficient, so to speak: you will need to do a lot of additional research, googling, ask questions on forums and maybe even take additional courses in parallel in order to make it to the end. But once that steep learning curve is overcome, you will enjoy all the benefits and, above all, will be well-armed to continue in the specialization.

By Kayla d V

Aug 2, 2021

Very informative course for learning the fundamentals of R programming, definitely will be revisiting it when needed, the information is clear and concise and the swirl practice activities are a great place to start learning to code. How ever, the assignments require some advanced knowledge that is not provided on this course, I had to rely heavily on the web for being able to solve them. Be prepared for that. I hope they include more advanced and explained exercises in the future to make this course more complete.

By Rachel R

Jul 8, 2018

Awesome overview of R. This course feels like a real college class, complete with deadlines to hold you accountable. It's challenging, but straightforward, so it's pretty simple to get your certification in the four weeks allotted. Took off one star because the estimated time for each week is fairly inaccurate - the Swirl exercises take no more than 20 minutes apiece, but the programming assignments each take a few hours to figure out. All in all, great class - I feel much more prepared to work in R in the future!

By Andrew H

Mar 26, 2017

If you don't have experience programming, this course is probably impossible without extensive online research to complete assignments. Perhaps this is a good thing - I guess we're supposed to be learning how to 'hack' our education and find answers on our own in the future as we lead our own projects. Still, being a complete noob, I would have prefered a more robust introduction to the language. In the end, however, I did feel relatively competent (good enough to be dangerous to myself) in R after 4 weeks.

By Trevor P

Feb 12, 2016

Good introduction to R. Without my programming background, I think this course would be more difficult. For example, when I think I should use a switch statement in an assignment, I already know what a switch is, I just need to search online to learn how to do it in R. At the same time, speaking as someone who's worked in software engineering, a lot of any programming job is not about being taught everything but being taught enough to then go out, search online, and find out what you need to get the job done.

By Felix C

May 24, 2020

Excellent course in terms of content, the videos and quizzes are nice if a bit elementary compared to the level of the last major programming assignment, and the transition from using elementary functions into actual programming is not handled that well though, it does require previous programming intuition in order to do so smoothly. Programming asignments are tough, and its very time-demanding, and I got stuck in a couple sections. The practice exercises with the Swirl package are also very nice.

By Cindy C L R

Jun 9, 2020

Es un curso que requiere de bastante tiempo porque las tareas de programación de las semanas 3 y 4 pueden ser muy frustrantes, estuve a punto de abandonar pero con la ayuda de los foros pude hacer todas las tareas perfectamente. No obstante, me tomó más tiempo de los planeado. Recomiendo revisar los foros apenas se terminen de leer las instrucciones de las tareas de programación para evitar perder el interés. Yo lo disfruté, me sentí retada y reforcé mis conocimientos previos de R en funciones.

By Kim K

Aug 8, 2018

If you have basic programming knowledge it will help you move through this course and meet deadlines, or you will need to set aside a very large amount of time daily to learn. I hear DataCamp has great tutorials for learning and practicing R along with the Swirl practice problems provided with weekly assignments for this course. The forums are a very good supplement to understanding the details of the project assignments and quizzes. Rigorous and rewarding when you put the work in.

By Glenn W

Jan 8, 2019

I learned a lot. I have programming experience, but it was 20 years ago. I would have enjoyed the course more if there had been more focused and relevant examples. The syntax of R is not straightforward and my style of learning likes to have examples to reference. The R Programming book is helpful, but i found myself using a lot of other reference material and I would have moved thru the class faster (and with less frustration) had the presentations had more relevant examples.

By Joe D

Mar 17, 2019

A thoroughly enjoyable course but some of the assignments (in particular lexical scoping week 3 programming assignment) features concepts that were far outside of the week's lecture material. Fortunately the forums were extremely useful in figuring out what to do. Without them, the assignments would have been next to impossible (for a person new to R). For that reason I give it 4 of 5 stars. If those lecture notes are included in the required reading then I'd happily give it a 5.

By Lucas D O

Jul 1, 2019

The lectures, quizzes, and practice swirl assignments are great for getting a handle on introductory-level R programming. However, I found that the programming assignments were inappropriately difficult for a course this level seeing as they require other skills/know-how not taught in this course. I hope the instructors reconsider a change to their curriculum so as not to overwhelm students, many of whom are having their first experience with programming in low-level languages.

By Alexander S

May 10, 2020

Good course on the basics, steep learning curve in the later topics, but doable. I see why, but some concepts are barely touched upon in the lectures and for total beginners (like me), a dive into some google searches or R books is more useful than the course material itself in later chapters. Also, some data or information is outdated and should be updated. Other than that, clear structure, good lectures and help in forum and form of the mentors is great. Would recommend.

By ZJ.eco

Jul 16, 2017

R Programming introduces many useful concepts and skills to learner in the first stage like me. During my study, course forum and the "swirl" package played very important roles. I am new to the R language, thus the assignment after the course are difficult for me. Thanks to the course forum, I learned a lot from others, and the "swirl" package helped me understand some course more efficient. I will keep on going at Coursera, thanks for the teachers and classmates.

By Yifan W

Oct 23, 2016

课程比较多的讲述了R的基础知识,这是什么不会搜什么的学习方式所不能带来的。希望课程能增加一些更有趣的作业。同时,短时间内接触大量基础知识容易感到枯燥并且难以牢记,建议每一个视频后面增加短短的几个编程的习题,这样可以更快地掌握。

The course is more about the basic knowledge of R, which is good considering that looking for the answer when meeting with problems cannot teach this. Hope that more interesting assignments could be added. Finally, too much basic knowledge makes people boring, it would be better if after each video the students could do some short programming tasks.

By Alina S T

Sep 23, 2019

Lectures should include examples of problem-solving and debugging related to the assignments. Every new concept/function introduced should be exemplified on an R dataset. Don't leave it all too swirl. Assignments should not introduce new concepts. Very useful would be examples of script optimization. I spent 90%of the time figuring out what was wrong with my script, and 10% on lectures, which were not clearly explained and very often were hard to focus on.

By Qianfan W

Feb 22, 2016

A quick warm up course for new learner in R. I spent a week to went through the course material and most of the experiment/programming tasks. Now feel quite comfortable to basic R. The course might be improved if more time are spent on some concrete case studies. Some useful functions/routines like str, csv header preprocessing are very handy and it is great to learn these. The last part, debug and profile seem not big concerns for new learners.

By Abir N

Aug 1, 2020

The best part of the course is it's assignments which help us enormously to cover up the topics which we have learnt so far in this course. But the biggest downside is the toughness of the assignments which makes the life of a simple student horrible. We have to consult sources outside of coursera to complete them which i think should be covered up well by the lectures in the series.Otherwise the course is a great headstart for beginners.

By Gopinath V

Sep 14, 2016

The course is very well laid out to demonstrate the main features of R programming language. (To elaborate on one thing that I liked) The programming assignment for the 4th week (rating/choosing hospital based on outcome) is very helpful to try out what I learnt from the course so far. All the 3 parts of this question are connected well, and I hope the rest of the courses of the Data Specialization is also implementing similar format.

By Anthony O

Jun 7, 2016

R Programming has solid information and exercises on just that! However the videos and sections for each week are not very clearly structured. Sometimes the end assignment can take many times the number of hours the rest of the content in a week requires. I'd be careful about taking this course while working unless you can devote serious time to programming projects on your off days. That stated, the course is excellent otherwise.

By Leonardo G C

Jun 18, 2017

Very good course; I would give it 5 stars if the lessons would include more examples of how to apply the functions and programming techniques learned in different situations or data sets, before que programming assignments. The current lessons show very basic examples and leave a lot open for one to figure out on your own, I know you're trying to encourage self-learning, but still... Right now this is rather some 70% self-learning.

By Baylen S

Dec 19, 2016

Overall course was good. I think there is a bit of a gap in terms of helping providing additional understanding of application of some the concepts in context of a solution. I think the course does a good job explaining the concept, but I feel the course could use some additional examples of application of the concepts to help facilitate the programming assignments. The Swirl exercise are good...but almost seem to rudimentary.

By aaron m

Jan 22, 2021

I really enjoyed this course, however I have 2 main gripes; 1. The whole process of pushing to github is not very well explained and although if you search in the forums you will eventually find a solution that works, it was still a pain. 2. I loved creating the functions very important, however I felt the material was very light. Too bad Roger and team can't update this course. It is really beneficial to the overall program.

By BIRASA F

Oct 13, 2020

The course was interesting, nevertheless it required me to spent many hours thinking to approach assignments which seemed to somehow tricky. fortunately there was an extremely important and vibrant discussion forums created for students to refer to while approaching those assignment. I recommend every student to read the discussion forum, especially when one is confused on how to do the assignments. otherwise, thanks a lot!