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R Programming Courses

Learn R with a variety of online courses and lessons from Harvard, MIT, and more of the world's leading universities. Become familiar with the R console, R community, algorithms and more.

What is R Programming?

The R programming language is used for data analysis, data manipulation, graphics, statistical computing and statistical analysis. In short, R helps you analyze data sets beyond basic Excel file analysis. The R programming language and development environment are open source and have grown in popularity since its conception in the early 90s by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The R Development Core Team is a community of developers engaged in development and support of the R project from the R Foundation - a not for profit organization providing support for R and other innovations in statistical computing. R is a free software environment that runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Linux, Windows and Mac OS.

Online Courses in R Programming and R Tutorials

Learners will find a number of excellent courses for R tutorials, many that are part of a statistics or data science curriculum. For example, Harvard's Data Science Professional Certificate program consists of 8 courses, many featuring R language. Take Harvard's R Basics course for a beginning R tutorial. Additionally, Harvard’s Statistics and R is a free, 4-week online course that takes students through the fundamental R programming skills necessary to analyze data.

Microsoft’s Introduction to R for Data Science course is part of the Microsoft Professional Program Certificate in Data Science and gives an excellent overview of the fundamentals and basic syntax of the R language. Learn the major R data structures and how to create stunning data visualizations through r code and r packages. The course offers fun, interactive coding challenges that reinforce your knowledge through real-world exercises.

Some of the deeper level learnings in R programming tutorial include R source code and R functions, R studio, R data types, command lines and command prompts, time-series analysis, linear regression and logistic regression, data frames, R objects, basic data, CRAN and Fortran code, assignment operators, read.table functions, normal distribution, ANOVA, generalized linear models, survival analysis, and more . There's lots to learning R and statistics, but an R tutorial on edX can help you master these concepts.

Jobs in R Programming

R programming skills are listed as a job requirement on thousands of jobs in the fields of statistics and data analysis. You’ll find R coding experience either required or recommended in job postings for data scientists, machine learning engineers, big data engineers, IT specialists, database developers and much more. Adding R coding language skills to your CV will help you in any one of these data specializations requiring mastery of statistical techniques.

Expand your skillset with R Programming for Data Science

If you’re on a path to a career in data science or statistics, a course in R should definitely be on your list. Take an introductory course and add experience with this popular programming language to your resume. Get started coding with statistical software today!