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Learner Reviews & Feedback for Building R Packages by Johns Hopkins University

4.1
stars
221 ratings

About the Course

Writing good code for data science is only part of the job. In order to maximizing the usefulness and reusability of data science software, code must be organized and distributed in a manner that adheres to community-based standards and provides a good user experience. This course covers the primary means by which R software is organized and distributed to others. We cover R package development, writing good documentation and vignettes, writing robust software, cross-platform development, continuous integration tools, and distributing packages via CRAN and GitHub. Learners will produce R packages that satisfy the criteria for submission to CRAN....

Top reviews

KM

Jun 3, 2019

Fantastic course... Unfortunately, not too many people registered, it's tough to get your assignments graded. The program is the great continuation to the 10 course R data science specialization...

M

Jun 10, 2022

Useful programming exercises to guide learning the basic elements of R packages. Also glad that I got my assignments graded within a week following submission (thought it would take much longer).

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1 - 25 of 59 Reviews for Building R Packages

By Shawn M

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Feb 15, 2019

There is much I like about this course and also many areas for improvement. First, the online book that comes with the course presents an excellent overview of the steps required to build an R package. It will eventually get you where you need to go. However, some of the material is now out of date (e.g. functions moved from one package to another), there are no longer any mentors around, and the discussions boards are empty apart from people trying to get their assignments peer graded. Also, the content in the book, while good, is incomplete in many cases. I would highly suggest buying the "R Packages" book by Hadley Wickham as an additional reference since it fills many of the gaps and goes into much greater detail.

By Matthew M

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Jan 14, 2019

good but needs a little updating - several commands this teaches you to use are now depracated.

By Rebecca G

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Jul 23, 2017

This course was not great. Almost all of the information is a screen scrape from a book and peer-evaluation, so you may be better off just getting the book and going through it. The mentors very occasionally participated, the authors never. The assignments are poorly written and missing too much detail.

By Zsolt P

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Sep 21, 2018

The material is not bad, however, this is just a refurbished version of a corresponding book written by the authors. Literally, all the readings are just excerpts from this book with typos all over the place. Save some money and just read that, I think this is a minimal extra work cash grab and you feel that all throughout. The final project is fine but not too fun (and the reading material is insufficient for it), it isn't worth the money either.

By Christopher M P

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Feb 10, 2020

Final assignment may not be reviewed for weeks. If you go on to capstone, issue could extent into months. Expect to use many external resources.

By George L

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Jul 24, 2019

Lots of outdated material and no mentors remain to assist. Documentation is incomplete and left to the user's imagination. There have got to be better courses than this.

By Jonathan D

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Apr 3, 2018

Poor course material made it difficult to complete the final assignment. The course has little to do with R and more to do with Software development methodologies.

By Edmund J L O

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Jan 20, 2018

This course really boosted my confidence in writing codes, functions and i look forward to someday writing my own package. The course left me on such a high note that I made a couple of presentations using the plots in my vignette. I wanted to somehow show my appreciation to the authors of the course. The choice of a real life dataset made it really very interesting for me. Here's the link to the presentations i made. I'm not sure if it should be shared with your students, so i'll leave that up to you. Thanks again for making learning so much fun. BTW, it was a bit of a cliffhanger for me. I only got my package to pas travis at the last minute. Here are the links:

http://rpubs.com/DocOfi/350304 and

http://rpubs.com/DocOfi/350099

By Rahul V

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May 10, 2021

This was my first Coursera course I completed. I received a financial aid to do this. This course didn't have any video lecture but a loose guideline on how to build an R package. This broad level guideline helped me to get an overview and did lots of google searches and bookdown blogs to figure things out.

It would be useful to have some more resources as a list. There were no TAs available to help out. But, I heavily made use of the discussion rooms to get my grades done and peer reviewed at least 15 submissions. This course is a good push to learn building R packages. Thanks again for this course

4 stars for the graded assignments which was the major and most useful part of the course

By Julia M

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Aug 13, 2021

This course is in desperate need of updating. Not only are the R functions it references deprecated, but the websites it instructs us to use have changed. The previous two courses were very helpful in walking through process and understanding what was happening at each step. By the time it came to do the assignment, I could not figure out how to do any of what was required from the course materials alone and needed to refer to help documents for all the functions and travis to figure out how to make everything work.

By Damian S

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Jun 21, 2018

Among the worst courses I have found on Coursera. Once again, just a bunch of text, cut and pasted (sloppily) from their book and other resources. Examples are poor and insufficient, and much of what they ask you to do in the project is not covered well, or at all in the course forcing you to learn on your own. I don't object to self-education, but then, why bother taking this course? Can't believe they are charging money for this.

By João G C

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Jun 1, 2020

This isn't really a course, consists just of having you read a book. There is zero content, zero support and zero walk-troughs. The final project is over-complex, given the level of content and support provided by the course. I don't recommend this course to anyone.

By Tim S

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Feb 12, 2018

Iam actually waiting for over one week to get graded. I dont want to pay for waiting!

By Jason S

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Nov 27, 2017

R packages are essential learning. This class covers packages including documentation, vignettes, testing, building, and checking for compatibility with CRAN. It also gets you into git and travis (for continuous integration), with an entire side of open source philosophy and legal. If you can pass this, you *will* be able to create and maintain an R package.

By Jay B

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Aug 5, 2017

The difficulty of the c ourse will depend on your background. If you have software development experience plus git, the course details the steps of releasing an R package to the community. If you have never worked with git or released software, this is a good way to tie those skills to your R skills.

By Youdinghuan C

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Dec 25, 2017

This course provides useful knowledge in building R packages, as well as opportunities to implement our knowledge. However, as the previous courses in the series, the last module (week) is extremely challenging compared to the previous ones.

By Konstantin M

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Jun 4, 2019

Fantastic course... Unfortunately, not too many people registered, it's tough to get your assignments graded. The program is the great continuation to the 10 course R data science specialization...

By Mio R

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Jun 11, 2022

Useful programming exercises to guide learning the basic elements of R packages. Also glad that I got my assignments graded within a week following submission (thought it would take much longer).

By Moisés E A

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Jan 16, 2017

Very good course for intermediate/advanced R users. Sad that you are elegible to do assignments only if you pay.

By Gregorio A A P

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Aug 26, 2017

Excellent, but I would be grateful if you could translate all your courses of absolute quality into Spanish.

By Yi X

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Feb 2, 2019

There are not so mang classmates for peer reviewing. Please set other alternative ways for grading

By Christopher B

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Mar 30, 2017

This is a critical skill and it's barely covered anywhere else. Thanks for making this course!

By Marco M

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Nov 16, 2020

This is an excellent course, a really good starting point to learn how to build R packages.

By George P

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Mar 13, 2022

The course delivered the basic goals of creating a package for the first time in R!

By Cardy M I

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Oct 7, 2017

Overall, this was a good course to learn the intricacies of building R packages.