I’ve been attending many workshops lately, and they have been very instructional. In the past week, I’ve attended workshops on Python and R, both coding languages. I am an absolute beginner and wanted to share my impressions with my class colleagues. Here it goes:

The Python workshop was geared to basic beginners which made it easy to follow along. The presenters were very helpful in assisting us in downloading the program and setting it up. Some of us had issues during the set-up process and were guided to a breakout room for individual help. Once done, we were given an introduction to the interface and some basic language prompts. Several of the prompts introduced were the comment prompt (#) to make a comment without executing an operation, print, which shows the item in question. There were several others. When I asked how this would be used for a project, I was asked to wait until the next session to get the answer.

The R workshop was pretty much similar in that it was geared for basic beginners and it was pretty easy to follow. However, the presenter started the presentation with finished projects, which gave an end point to focus on as an example. Again, we learned the interface and basic operations. However, with this workshop we downloaded data from the UN and worked on it, which helped solidify the concepts. Getting my hands wet so to speak made the learning stick more.

After attending both workshops, I’ve noted several slight differences. (Please keep in mind I’m an absolute beginner.)
Python seems to be the one to go to for big data analysis.
R seems to be the one to go for visualization.
Python seems a bit easier.
R seems to have a bit of a higher learning curve.

As to the debate, Python vs R?
Answer- Python & R

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.