The goal of these readings is to get you ready to learn how the R statistical programming language can be used to find and tell compelling news stories.
You can either watch the Coursera videos (“R Programming,” Week 1: Getting Started & R Nuts and Bolts, all videos) or you can read pp. 12-45 of R Programming for Data Science.
Both should take between 1.5 – 3 hours.
If you’re a hands-on learner, you’ll want to complete these exercises, which take maybe 30 minutes to complete.
You might also find it very helpful to make for yourself a “vocab list” with these words and definitions (as they’re used in the context of R):
- objects
- attributes
- vector
- list
- matrix
- factor
- data frame
- names
- subsetting