A roundup of what the news nerds slack suggested for a reporter who was looking to up their data skills.
This is what I asked:
I had a question from a business reporter who was looking to up their data game in their own time, was thinking of either doing Python / PANDAS, or R, or maybe just upping their Excel skills. They're interested in learning how to do data exploration and maybe a little bit of scraping. They asked me for where to go to learn this and I didn't have a lot of good answers -- thought I'd ask here what people who have done the same thing can recommend.
And these are the responses:
I did the coursera john hopkins data science program, it taught me R and helped give me a foundational introduction to data science, but that was a pretty decent time investment, so obviously not right for everyone Link: https://www.coursera.org/specializations/jhu-data-science#courses
The Coursera Johns Hopkins R class was what took me from “fiddling with R” to “understanding why what I’m doing with R is working so I can generalize” Hadley Wickham’s free ebook “R for Data Science” is also a really accessible way to learn code. It’s free, and has a focus on immediately tangible results — you start off making graphs with code, and only later get into the nitty-gritty: https://r4ds.had.co.nz
^That’s a great book. Also @sharon.machlis’s Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism is a desk reference for me. And @abtran’s “R for Journalists” is a great start. http://learn.r-journalism.com/en/how_to_use_r/
Thanks @Lucia Walinchus! Of course I’m an R fan, but if your colleague decides to go the Excel route, they might want to take a look at Paul Bradshaw’s Finding Stories in Spreadsheets https://leanpub.com/spreadsheetstories. Also @mjwebster has posted some very useful training materials https://sites.google.com/view/mj-basic-data-academy/home
When I teach R to students I usually use some combination of Hadley/Garrett’s free textbooks and Swirl, which is great for more directed learning! http://swirlstats.com/