Read R-help. :) Seriously, you will see all kinds of problems and questions. 
Some of the simpler ones you can try yourself and see how your approach matches 
other peoples. 

Google around for some R blogs and see if you find any that are useful. 
https://learnr.wordpress.com/ might be useful. IIRC there is a mixture of real 
intro and very sophisticated material there.

Think of something simple exercise or analysis that you would normally do in 
Matlab or even in a spreadsheet and see how easily you can translate this to R. 
If needed think more of what you would expect students in first year to be 
doing if you are a TA and duplicate it in R. 

A great intro to R, in my opinion is Dan Navarro's book (available as a pdf at 
my last look) but I suspect from your point of view not so good as he is a 
psychologist and is writing for them. 
http://health.adelaide.edu.au/psychology/ccs/docs/lsr/lsr-0.3.pdf

With your educational background An Introduction to R may be a good read but, 
as a non-techie, my normal advise is not to read it right away. It is a 
fantastic reference and repays reading after a few weeks into R but it is IMHO 
emphatically NOT an introduction in the same way that the Navarro book is. (I 
am now changing my name and entering a witness protection program).

Learn as much as possible about the various basic data structures in R.  As 
someone said use str() a lot.  Here is an example why. Just copy and paste:
dat1  <- structure(list(aa = structure(1:10, .Label = c("1", "2", "3", 
"4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "10"), class = "factor"), bb = c(10L, 
9L, 8L, 7L, 6L, 5L, 4L, 3L, 2L, 1L)), .Names = c("aa", "bb"), row.names = c(NA, 
-10L), class = "data.frame")

dat2  <-  structure(list(aa = 1:10, bb = c(10L, 9L, 8L, 7L, 6L, 5L, 4L, 
3L, 2L, 1L)), .Names = c("aa", "bb"), row.names = c(NA, -10L), class = 
"data.frame")

dat1
dat2  # looks a lot like dat1 :)


with(dat1, aa*bb)
with(dat2 , aa*bb)

str(dat1)
str(dat2)


BTW dat1 and dat2 are in dput() format which is the preferred way to supply 
data to the R-help list.  It provides a perfect copy of the data as it sits on 
your machine and avoids little problems like we see in dat1 vs dat2 if other 
readers are loading data on their machines.

If the course has not already recommended this, get a good dedicatd R text 
editor or IDE.  Everyone has their own, but some popular ones seem to be 
Tinn-R, EMACS, RStudio, and there are many others.

John Kane
Kingston ON Canada

PS: Don't post in HTML. it mangles code.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: varun1...@gmail.com
> Sent: Fri, 22 May 2015 19:01:12 -0400
> To: r-help@r-project.org
> Subject: [R] R programming
> 
> Hello there,
> 
> I wanted to learn R programming over this summer hence I registered for
> the
> R programming course on Coursera. I understood most part of the lecture
> but
> I'm having a hard time with the assignments.
> 
> Till now I can write small functions such as calculating mean of a vector
> or an array. I can also use arguments such as lapply, sapply, rbind etc.
> 
> I am not very handy with coding in R. I get completely stuck.
> 
> What should I do to learn gradually?
> 
> Can anyone tell me what to do step by step. I'm an average student
> pursuing
> my masters in Engineering Management at UNC Charlotte.
> 
>       [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>

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