Introduction to Data Science: Data Analysis and Prediction Algorithms with R

This book was written as a part of HarvardX’s data science series on edx.org. Judging from the book, I am sure the course is well crafted, although the approximately $1000 price tag (at the time of writing this post) is a hard sell. Fortunately, you can read the book associated with the course for free! I very much like the book; it starts from the fundamentals of R and teaches a good balance of base R and Tidyverse programming. As for the actual concepts covered in the book, the book covers: data visualization, statistics, data manipulation, and machine learning. I especially appreciate the statistics section that does a good job of covering over-arching statistics concepts people will need as a data analyst or scientist. I particularly liked that spread throughout the statistics section; there is valuable information on how to do Monte Carlo simulations, which is an important tool that is not always discussed. The free book can be read through this free link, http://rafalab.dfci.harvard.edu/dsbook/, and if you prefer to read a Kindle or physical copy you can find it using this commissioned link: https://amzn.to/44o66iQ.