Data science is undoubtedly one of the sought-after career opportunities. Today, the kind of popularity and demand this field enjoys draws every bit of our attention. With everyone shifting their career gear towards the magical world of data, having a fair idea as to what is required to excel professionally becomes critical. There are a set of prerequisites that when mastered would result in you standing apart from the rest. R language is one among them. It is impossible to imagine data science without R. Here's why.

Before unfolding why R has a major role to play in data science, let's have a look at what exactly is R. R is a software environment and statistical programming language that is specifically built for statistical computing and data visualization. The areas that R majorly caters to are – statistical analysis, visualizing the data, and manipulating data.

R is considered one of the excellent languages to make the best of data. Even if you are a beginner with no prior coding experience, R is absolutely easy to learn.

Now that we have a fair idea as to what exactly is R, let us know what makes it arguably the best language to learn for data science. Here are some of the reasons supporting the same.

Learning data science gets a lot easier with R – Though Python is considered to be one of the most user-friendly languages, starting with R has its own set of benefits – the most prominent one being – how R is designed keeping data manipulation and analysis in mind. Thus, learning the core skills of data science – data manipulation, data visualization, and machine learning – can actually turn out to be a lot easier in R. The fact that data science involves dealing with both structured as well as unstructured data is the reason why R is heavily used.

R is every tech firm's favorite

Google, Facebook, HP, Uber, you name it and you would be surprised to know how the top tech firms prefer R over other languages and how they hire data scientists who excel in the same. Well, not just tech firms, banks and other financial institutions, research labs, academic institutions, and pretty much all those fields that require data to be analysed make use of R.

A blessing for statistics

It is solely because of R's syntax that one can create complex statistical models with just a few lines of code. Therefore, R finds itself as the programming choice of most of the statisticians.

Free and open-source

Yet another area that draws attention as far as R is concerned is that it is open-source and absolutely free.

Packages

R boasts of a fantastic ecosystem of packages and other resources that are great for data science. This is for the sole reason that R is designed keeping statistical analysis in mind.

Now that you know how much of an importance R holds in the field of data science, roll up your sleeves and start studying R for you know the opportunities this language would reap in are truly magical!