What do you think about Data Science course on Coursera? I don't know which one to pursue. They also teach the use of R langauge.
What I mean is that they have you spend weeks and months learning data types and 'for loops' when in reality, you don't need those to get insights from data. There are other toolsets (namely: dplyr and ggplot) that don't require you to know control flow, etc. If you're a developer, I'm sure that sounds strange, but believe me, you don't need software development style knowledge. What you need is to be able to do data manipulation and data exploration. You need to be able to turn data into insight.
Said differently, these courses are teaching statistics and CS in R. What they should be teaching is data manipulation and data visualization right from the start.
I'm not a developer, just a mechanical engineer and having extreme difficulty in landing a job. Do you believe if I do the course on the data analysis will allow me to get into the Financial industry? I really enjoy the concept of FOREX, stock trading and setting up algorithms for it like what 'investment companies' do or the 'hedge fund' guys.
This environment is... how to describe it? "often wild horse, sometimes donkey"
Can be very (very!) defiant sometimes and have some well known issues with very big objects and small memory machines (is easily linkable with databases so this is a minor trouble)... but is also much rewarding.
I think that any hour that you spend on R will be worth it, just don't be a masochist, buy or borrow a couple of good introductory books, read some manuals and internet links like the former and, when you have some practice and wish to improve, one of the best ways is to remember the repositories, install some packages of your interest with
R> install.packages("packagename")
And take a look to as many R-code of those as you can.
Highly recommended. Try it.
Using R to simulate the finances of public sector pension funds:
http://www.r-bloggers.com/using-r-to-simulate-the-finances-o...
Curiously a job position was announced (four monts ago, currently closed) at the end of the note in the same link. They were looking for an R expert.