If you&#x27;ve followed my posts on Hacker News, you may notice I&#x27;m a HUGE user of R. I actually started using R because the classes I took as a statistics minor in college required the use of R. And it <i>sucked</i>, mostly because trying to reimplement statistical algorithms can be very fussy (it&#x27;s not as well suited toward linear algebra as MATLAB and Octave)<p>I note that because the curriculum seems to focus on more machine-leaning-esque algorithms like Random Forests and SVM, which are heavy in linear algebra, but the class itself states it is not math heavy.<p>In R, you typically implement these algorithms...by installing a package from CRAN that contains the algorithm. (I skimmed through the linked book at that appears to be the case)<p>Nothing wrong with that, of course. Although a more proper intro to R would require teaching how to use the factor data type without going insane. (Processing data is half the battle, and something I wish I learned at college)