65 karma · joined November 11, 2014
2. The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson and McAfee
3. The Lights in the Tunnel by Martin Ford
4. Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford
5. Average is Over by Tyler Cowen -specifically, the parts about labor market bifurcation and man-machine pairs
Brynjolfsson and McAfee are MIT economists. Top notch. Cowen is also an excellent economist at George Mason.
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.
Dplyr and ggplot2 (noted by baldfat) are exceptional.
I recently wrote a tutorial on dplyr here: http://www.sharpsightlabs.com/dplyr-intro-data-manipulation-...
To put this simply, dplyr's syntax is set up to create streamlined workflows. All of the major data management tasks (sort, subset, group, summarize) are easy to do. And they can be "chained" together (much like using pipes in Unix).
Ggplot (another R package) is an amazing data visualization tool. The syntax has a deep underlying structure, based on the Grammar of Graphics theoretical framework. I won’t go into that too much, but suffice it to say, when you learn the ggplot2 syntax, you’re actually learning how to think about data visualization in a very deep way. You’ll eventually understand how to create complex visualizations without much effort.
GGplot and dplyr are the reason I settled on R (instead of Python). When you use them together (again, using "chaining") you can explore your data rapidly and also create really high quality analyses.