This course provides a rigorous introduction to the R programming language, with a particular focus on using R for software development in a data science setting. Whether you are part of a data science team or working individually within a community of developers, this course will give you the knowledge of R needed to make useful contributions in those settings. As the first course in the Specialization, the course provides the essential foundation of R needed for the following courses. We cover basic R concepts and language fundamentals, key concepts like tidy data and related "tidyverse" tools, processing and manipulation of complex and large datasets, handling textual data, and basic data science tasks. Upon completing this course, learners will have fluency at the R console and will be able to create tidy datasets from a wide range of possible data sources.
This course is part of the Mastering Software Development in R Specialization
Offered By
About this Course
Skills you will gain
- Data Manipulation
- Regular Expression (REGEX)
- R Programming
- Rstudio
Offered by

Johns Hopkins University
The mission of The Johns Hopkins University is to educate its students and cultivate their capacity for life-long learning, to foster independent and original research, and to bring the benefits of discovery to the world.
Syllabus - What you will learn from this course
Basic R Language
In this module, you'll learn the basics of R, including syntax, some tidy data principles and processes, and how to read data into R.
Basic R Language: Lesson Choices
Data Manipulation
During this module, you'll learn to summarize, filter, merge, and otherwise manipulate data in R, including working through the challenges of dates and times.
Data Manipulation: Lesson Choices
Text Processing, Regular Expression, & Physical Memory
During this module, you'll learn to use R tools and packages to deal with text and regular expressions. You'll also learn how to manage and get the most from your computer's physical memory when working in R.
Text Processing, Regular Expression, & Physical Memory: Lesson Choices
Choice 1: Get credit while using swirl | Choice 2: Get credit by providing a code from swirl
Large Datasets
In this final module, you'll learn how to overcome the challenges of working with large datasets both in memory and out as well as how to diagnose problems and find help.
Reviews
- 5 stars59.68%
- 4 stars24.97%
- 3 stars7.44%
- 2 stars3.24%
- 1 star4.64%
TOP REVIEWS FROM THE R PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT
Very good overall. I feel that the first weeks are too easy relative to the last week - more involved practice and exercises would have been good before getting to the final quiz.
A thorough course that covers a lot of efficient data manipulation styles within the R environment. I learned a lot of neat tricks that help with quick analysis of large data frames.
Great course, and teaches the fundamentals. Google is your friend and websites like RFunction will supplement perfectly. Recommend the use of RStudio to work along course.
I like the swirl exercises, but found the text lessons to be very short. Overall, good but I hope some video will be given in future modules.
About the Mastering Software Development in R Specialization
R is a programming language and a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, widely used by data analysts, data scientists and statisticians. This Specialization covers R software development for building data science tools. As the field of data science evolves, it has become clear that software development skills are essential for producing and scaling useful data science results and products.

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