Why Spend Time and Money to Learn R Programming?

What is R and how is it related to S?

Ever heard of the text - An Introduction to S Language? R is nothing but a dialect of the S language, right now it has come to be, by far the most dominant dialect of the S Language.

S was born as research project at Bell Labs not more than a few decades back. The programming language was developed for data analysis, graphical stimulation and statistical modelling. While some may argue that it is a powerful language for uses beyond data analysis with a handful of powerful features. However, it can and does have several other uses beyond data analytics.

Why the language of R?

A few points you must understand about R programming is:

• R is not just a package for statistical analysis it is a language
• It is both powerful and flexible
• It is designed to operate in a way that problems are thought about
  
  

While the difference between a package and a language is only subtle, but such a subtle difference is enough to make a huge impact. R language is not the same as R package, and why so has been discussed as follows.

A package allows users to perform a specific set of tasks, using options that can be varied. But a language allows you to specify the performance of new tasks. Like for instance, with R you have the ability to create a new form of regression, while it still allows users to easily perform the same sort of standard regression on a collection of datasets (it can be from 5 to 500 datasets)

However, the key is the abstraction. You must realize easily that all the 5 regressions are almost the same. The mere difference is the involvement of data in each of the regressions. But in your head you have abstracted the specific tasks so that they all look almost the same size. And the moment you see the abstractions it is easy to teach the R abstraction. And languages are all about abstraction.

R thinks the way we think:

The main objective behind designing R and S is to enable it to mirror the way humans think. A good example of this given as follows:

Consider that weight of an object is a function of (dependant on) the girth and height of the object. The formula of R to express this would be -

Weight ~ height + girth

The + here is not equivalent to + in case of addition.

Furthermore, another advantage of R programming is the fact that it is vector-oriented. Thus, this means that objects are usually treated as a whole. Similar to how humans think of a situation, different from thinking of situations as a collection of numbers.

For example to change the unit of height from inches to centimetres, the command in R would be -

Height.cm

What makes R good for data analysis?

R is not the only language available for data analysis, then why use R for data analysis rather than any other?

Here is a list:

1. It is an interactive language
2. Ease of Data structures
3. Graphics
4. Finding missing values
5. Packages are available
6. Community support
7. Functions as first class objects
   
   

The process of data analysis is inherently and interactive one, the thing you see at one stage will determine what you do next. It is important to be interactive as well as use language. So, to bring the two tools together - with an interactive language in summation is even more useful. A great advantage for R is that it is very useful for creating datasets. So, for a data analyst it is necessary to put this data into a natural form. With R the data analysts do not have to warp their data into a particular structure simply because that is available.

Also the graphics in data which is of elemental importance can be tweaked easily in R. As humans are predominantly visual, thus we need pictures to grasp numbers intuitively. Hence, it being of central importance for data analysis and with R graphics is simple. Also R is very well equipped for handling missing data problems. And finally, the R community is strong and very committed to offering valuable suggestions for improving data analysis.

Where to learn R:

A good place to start a comprehensive R programming course in Kolkata is at Techtree India. They have a dedicated faculty of experts in R programming training who can guide you from A to Z of R to deem young ambitious individuals industry ready.