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Welcome to the Data Science Resources Wiki which seeks to provide general information on topics of interest to budding data scientists, statisticians, and quantitative researchers. People are confused about where to begin and while there are in fact excellent on-line courses for various topics (e.g R programming, visualization, etc) it remains difficult to know where to start. This Wiki is organized into pages that roughly correspond to areas of significance in Data Science. As this is a Wiki, it is entirely possible, (and encouraged), for others to contribute.

Where To Begin

I'm asked on a near weekly basis for beginning resources for Data Science and Data wrangling. I'm still working on a larger list although a solid beginning point is the free, online Data Journalism Handbook available at https://datajournalism.com/read/handbook/one (There is a second edition in preparation although it is not yet complete). While this is mostly a non-technical resource it does provide a way of thinking about data-driven projects that can be useful no matter what technology you choose to implement. What I like about this book is that it makes few assumptions about one's background while discussing the challenges associated with presenting data in a domain neutral way. Obviously, the more programming, statistical, or visualization skills one has, the better but even then it can be confusing to organize one's thoughts into a disciplined work flow that yields and interesting result.

Report Writing

Another resource is Roger Peng's Report Writing for Data Science in R which is available on LeanPub https://leanpub.com/reportwriting As to specific technologies that one might find to be useful in data-drive reports and data science in general, the following tools are a good starting point. Note that merely knowing what these technologies do is a good starting point - one need not be an expert in all of these. Simply knowing what the tools do is a good way to proceed even if you don't have practical experience. All of these are open source so no financial expense is required.