This is the first in a series of overview lectures that tell'll you about the other courses in the Data Science course track. I'm going to start off with R programming, which is another one of the most fundamental classes in our Data Science track. R is the language that we're going to be using for most of the data analysis and data science that we're going to be doing on the computer science end. And so R will tell you, the R programming class will tell you a little bit about data types, about sub-setting data, reading and writing it from files. How to write functions, to do things to that data, how to debug them and then a little bit about simulation and optimization. So now I'm just going to show you a couple of examples of the sorts of things that you'll learn in that class. So for example you'll learn about the readLines function for reading text from a file. So in this case what we're going to be doing is we're going to be reading lines actually from the website of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. So this is the website right there. And so what we do is we go to that website and then we use the readLine func, readLines function to read the text from that site. And then we look at that text and you can actually see the HTML code, and it's actually been sucked into R that you can then use to analyze the website. Another thing that you'll be learning about is how to figure out when there's something wrong with your function. So, you'll be writing lots of functions in this class. And so, one thing that you want to know is when they aren't working, why aren't they working? And so this is a slide that comes from one of those about how do you figure out, what were you expecting, and what did you get? And how do you reproduce the problems so that you can figure out how that function works? Well you'll be leaning things like more detailed functions. So, for example, this is the lapply function. And so the lapply function takes a particular kind of argument. And a list in this case, and applies a function to all the elements of that list and returns something back to you. And so, this is interesting because it's one of the many examples where the actual, sort of, analysis is actually being done internally in C code. But you don't actually have to access to that. You can actually just use the R function. So this will cover everything from sort of the basics, to more complicated functions like lapply. And set you up very nicely for the rest of the course sequence.
