I gotta admit it. I’m hooked.
I recently stumbled upon this statistical programming software called R and I can’t seem to get enough of it after months of learning about it and using it.
I think it was quite a fortuitous encounter. In the course of my work, I often called upon to do a little data management, including data analysis. I’ve done a little bit of consulting in the past in this area, and have done data analysis ranging from the old-fashioned way (punching a calculator and using statistical tables) to using software such as Epi Info and SPSS (I’ve learned a bit of STATA, but never really got to using it).
The other day, my PC, on which I had SPSS installed, was beginning to act up and all I could think of was how I was going to have to shell out some good money to get it onto a new machine, as I didn’t have the setup files.
So, it was a pleasant surprise, when I registered for a refresher MOOC on data analysis being offered by University of Texas, to discover that there was an open source application they were going to use for the course. As they put me through installation steps for R and R Studio, I was like “whaaaat?”, when I saw the IDE interface of R Studio. I am yet to recover from the experience.
I’m not going to talk about the technical aspects of R that I’ve learnt and I will resist every temptation to display any code here, but I want to recommend to my colleagues and friends, if you haven’t started using R, do so now. Take a course or something like that and get a hold of this wonderful tool. To think that I’m just discovering this now.
‘Nuff said. More on this later…
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