Welcome

About this Book

No prior programming experience is necessary. This book is meant to assist individuals that are new to Data Science and/or new to computer programming as well as those that familiar with other languages but are new to the Elixir language. There are plenty of choices out there, you may be asking yourself questions like: Where do I start? Why should I invest my time into learning a new language? or How can Elixir be used for data science? The content of this book is designed to answers these questions and to provide a lighthouse to those that need a guide to safe shores.

In order to be an effective Data Scientist, you will need to learn to program, this is a must. Start programming with Elixir. Elixir is an exciting state-of-the-art computer language and has a growing ecosystem of Data Science tools.

The go-to programming languages for Data Science have been R and Python. We will explain and show why we beleive Elixir can be your one-stop-shop for all things Data Science. We will show how Elixir can be used for:

  • Data Cleaning/Wrangling

  • Data Visualization

  • Modeling

  • Publishing (Deploying) a Project - (i.e. Web Apps)

As you work through this book, you will learn how to program in Elixir. We will be focused on the disciplines of Data Science mentioned above.

Data Science is:

  • complex and requires skills like: Programming, Math, Stats, and Industry insight.

  • a growing and exciting field full of cutting edge capabilities like;

Our desire is to get as many people as possible excited about learning to program with Elixir and using Livebook to achieve their Data Science goals. As you progress to the end of this book, you will have a solid foundation of Data Science and will understand how to apply the principles with the fantastic tools that Elixir affords you. We would like to invite you to join us in exploring how to do Data Science with Elixir.

Note

This book is a work in progress. We will be continuously updating/adding sections and chapters as we complete them.

Why Translate R4DS?

In this book, we will walk through the concepts of Data Science and rebuild the code from the book R for Data Science (R4DS) with Elixir. In addition to translating the code, we will also be sprinkling in heavy doses of Elixir-specific features (real-time updates), packages (i.e. Explorer and Vega-Lite) and products (Livebook).

R4DS has been foundational for many getting into the field of Data Science. It has made Data Science very approachable. R4DS does a fantastic job laying out all the tasks a Data Scientist needs to do and not just the glamorous part of creating super cool models that write games, predict prices, or summarize text.

We view R4DS as a great benchmark for any language attempting to do Data Science. Our plan is to put Elixir through its paces by recreating all the code in R4DS and see where it shines and where it still has work to do. This will give you a clearer picture of how well it does with the workload of a real Data Scientist.

Note

We take no credit for the original R For Data Science material, as it was written by Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund.

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