What is swirl_courses?

This repository holds a collection of interactive courses designed to teach the R programming language. R is a language widely used for data analysis, statistics, and making charts and graphs from data. The courses here are meant to be taken inside the R console itself using a package called swirl, which turns the coding environment into a step-by-step lesson rather than a static reading exercise. The courses are grouped by difficulty. Beginner courses cover the basics of writing R code. Intermediate courses go into data manipulation tools and techniques for cleaning and reshaping data sets. Advanced courses cover statistical inference, including probability, hypothesis testing, and confidence intervals, roughly following the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization on Coursera. There is also a course aimed at people who want to write their own swirl lessons. Installation is done from inside R, not from this GitHub page. The simplest path is to install the swirl package, then call one function with the course name, and then start the session. For example, calling install_course("R Programming") fetches and sets up that course automatically. A manual fallback method exists for cases where the automatic install fails, and the repo links to a legacy guide as well. A version of the R Programming course called R Programming E was made for classroom use. It skips the Coursera credential prompts at the end of each lesson and instead sends a completion notification to the instructor by email, which is a workaround for tracking student progress without a full dashboard. Instructors are welcome to use these courses in their classes at no charge. The only restriction is that they should not charge students directly for access to the swirl software or its course content. The project is maintained by the same team behind the swirl package itself.