Together with the key people behind the data.table package, Matt Dowle and Arun Srinivasan,  DataCamp developed a brand new interactive course to bring your data analysis skillset up to date with the essentials of the powerful data.table package. Learn more on the data.table tutorial… The popularity of the data.table package is increasing and with good reason. Not only is the number of package downloads rising rapidly, but data.table is also talk of the R town given the numerous presentations of Matt and Arun at conferences such as useR!2014, EARL, R/Insurance and R/Finance.Data.table allows you to reduce your programming time as well as your computing time considerably, and it is especially useful if you often find yourself working with large datasets.  For example, to read in a 20GB .csv file with 200 million rows and 16 columns, data.table only needs 8 minutes thanks to the fread()function.  This  is instead of the hours it would take you with the read.csv() function. Once you understand its concepts and principles, the speed and simplicity of the package are astonishing!

On the data.table tutorial

However, to get the most out of data.table’s functionalities, you first have to overcome its learning curve: even though the syntax is not extremely difficult, it does take some practice to fully grasp it so its built-in functionalities can make your life easier. This is exactly why DataCamp has made an interactive online course on the data.table package for R and it has done so in collaboration with the key people behind it, namely Matt Dowle, main author, and Arun Srinivasan, co-author and major contributor. The data.table tutorial, which is unique as it is the only one of its kind, is called Data Analysis: the data.table way. It is designed to help you get started with the essentials of the data.table package. Among other things, you will learn all there is to know about operations such as selection and grouping in DT[i, j, by], and intermediate topics like chaining, setting keys and the different join types.The course is set up in DataCamp’s interactive learning platform that aims to enhance the learning experience by centering on learning-by-doing. The course is supplemented by short videos and slides to explain major elements.  You will discover the functionalities and how they interplay with each other step by step. This way, you will effectively learn hands on instead of losing time with suboptimal solutions like a four-hour screencast or webinar. What’s more, in order to consolidate your learning, every section ends with interactive exercises that let you practice the covered concepts while giving you tailored feedback.So, if you are looking for a qualitative course that brings you up to speed with one of the hottest packages in R today, go to DataCamp, take the data.table tutorial, and add the power of data.table to your data analytical skillset!