This is a difficult course to get through without prior programming experience. In spite of that, I would have given the course a 5-star rating if there were not such a large gap between the course as presented and the programming assignments for Weeks 2-4. As I noted in the post course survey, the course would have benefited from a couple of extra weeks in which a larger set of programming examples were provided that linked the course to the programming assignments. Otherwise, I thought the videos and the "Swirl" exercises were quite good. Dr. Peng has an easy manner about him, is clear and explains the basic concepts quite well.

R Programming in Coursera is a great course. You will learn a lot about R and a lot about advanced programming. But you will suffer along the way. Every lesson brings tons of knowledge, and every quiz will leave you with the feeling you only knew half of what was needed. You will have to fill in the blanks, which is easier if you have previous knowledge of R and/or have previous coding know-how. From someone who had taken other R programming courses, I loved and hated this one at the same time. It's a great way to really learn R, but be ready to put the additional hours and reading required to successfully pass.

This course is a very nice introduction to R, I enjoyed learning with Swirl and I found the concepts and materials presented were valuable. I like the teacher Lee and his videos. I feel that I'm closer to the world of the Data Scientist after completing this course.

Cons: The theory is very far from the exercices and the assignments. I struggled several hours (and days) building the code for week 2 and 4. I ended by looking for help in forums and I was forced to sometimes look at parts of published answers. The instructors must improve the examples and the exercises of coding previous to the assigments.

Overall it's a good course and I've learned a lot from it. But I think It'd be great to have more examples and context on how and why use those functions. To me R is a really quirky language and isn't really intuitive to use and it doesn't have a lot of functions that other programming languages have such as push and pop for lists. I remember spending like 5 hours trying to get it to work in a way that I'm more used to but then realized it could be done in a completely different manner. Most of the time I spend so much time on trivial stuff which I think can be avoided if more explanation is provided.

I believe this is an "intro" to R course with great intentions. But as a starting R programmer I found myself stuck on some of the materials without knowing where to turn except for stack overflow. The course moves too fast for a pure beginner.

The videos and textbook sometimes work out of sequence and on a couple of occasions I found myself needing to move ahead in the textbook to solve problems that videos had not covered and vice-versa.

But overall, it was a very nice intro. I gained some knowledge but will definitely need more in depth courses to master these programming concepts.

Pro: The course covers a lot of information and the necessary reference material to do the assignments

Cons: 1) This is definitely NOT a beginners course with no background with R. The assignments cover/test things that are not covered in class. Please don't advertise this to be a "no experience required" class. 2) The code that is presented in the lessons is overwhelming (read: daunting) to someone like me (with no experience). So it doesn't help when the instructor talks through the code. Please look at datacamp tutorials - If it wasn't for them, I wouldn't have passed this class.

The overall topics covered appear to be in line, however the course looses some of accessibility given the lack of participation from the instructor and moderators. This may be fine for someone with a stronger background in programming and statistics, but more novice users (like myself) may find it a bit challenging. Guidance is probably available deep in the message boards and somewhere in the world of google.

Overall, great course for exposure to R, but if you don't have a strong mathematical / stats background, be warned..you will be stretched. Good for some, but not for all.

The course was OK as an introductory course. I agree with most of what's done there, but - as I mentioned on forums - I dislike some of the quiz questions which were created not to check knowledge, but instead to make students give erroneous answers. For example, quiz checks for 4 output values and each option for selection has a different first digit, except for one. And it is this one that's correct... Why? If you want to check my output, then simply let me easily choose buy fact-checking first digit only... Don't give people possibility to make mistake where not important.

The swirl exercises are very good. The assignments are quite challenging but enjoyable. The last one took me > 9 hrs. I would suggest to first give a sample assignment. And then in the theory discuss the tools for that assignment. And then give the assignment. The theory is a lot of explanation - which I am battling to "hook" onto something. Why - because I had not been exposed to an application opportunity. The text in the slides are too small to view on a phone. Overall I feel proud to have completed the course and it gives me confidence to attempt problems with R.

Pros:

- If you don't know R well, or at all, you will learn a lot about R!

- The projects were sufficiently challenging and used real data. Great experience.

Cons:

- Some knowledge required in the assignments are not covered at all in the lectures, or even the textbook.

- The week 2 assignment was a bit less clear than it could've been.

Other thoughts: I wouldn't recommend this course for someone new to programming. You should have at least SOME programming experience. Even for someone with some coding experience it can be quite challenging. But that's what makes it so FUN!

Although course is good and mentors have put a lot of effort in designing and explaining certain concepts still i would say that assignment exercises are quite much tougher as code errors come quite easily due to lacking of basic use of functions with operators and else.

My request would be to at least provide the helpful links that is sort frames in data frame, extract operator links in assignment 3 just as one begins to start assignment 3 and not somewhere hidden into the discussion forums. In that way one can save crucial time and can solve it understanding more

The course is great and the points are really useful, but the gap between the classes and the assignments turn into a nightmare to reach the end of the course. Great teacher, but with more flow between the usage of all the mechanism together turn the learning process stronger, connecting the dots all alone is too absorbing and too time consuming, we need more understanding on the mechanics right before the assigments to elucidate what seems to be obvious right after concluded. Thank you for the hard working compiling this course! Move on and dont give up!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.