My Courses are now Free

A few months ago I announced a change in direction: rather than continuing to focus on Choroplethr-related development and introductory R training, I was going to focus on the broader field of Analytics Engineering. Today I am happy to announce that that effort has resulted in a new job. I am joining a marketing analytics consultancy as a Senior Data Science Engineer. (To reinforce that nothing written here is related to this job, I am choosing to not name the company.)

Since I will be working full-time on something unrelated to Choroplethr, I think it makes sense to make my Choroplethr-related courses free. As a reminder, these courses are Mapmaking in R with Choroplethr and Shapefiles for R Programmers. These courses previously sold for $99 each.

I would like to thank everyone who bought these courses in the past. Creating and maintaining Choroplethr took a lot of time over the years, and it was also a big risk. While course sales never paid the equivalent of, say, a full-time salary, they did help. And psychologically, the sales were a great reminder that people were, in fact, willing to pay for something related to the free software I had created.

I have also removed my free email course Learn to Map Census Data in R from this site. That course was one of the first educational materials I ever created related to Choroplethr. And while it was popular, I have always felt that I did a better job of covering that material in later courses.

If you are looking for an introduction to Choroplethr, the best place to start is now Mapmaking in R with Choroplethr. If you are interested in a deep dive of how Choroplethr works with Census data, then I recommend Mapping Census Bureau Data in R with Choroplethr. (I developed this course together with the US Census Bureau, and it has always been free).