by Angela Guess
Jessica Davis recently wrote in InformationWeek, “Looking to break into the field of data science or to gain the skills to be able to transition to this field in the future? Interested in becoming a data analyst and perhaps eventually moving into a data scientist role? Then you’re probably doing some research about what data science tools and programming languages you should learn first to to maximize your chances of landing your dream job. Should you focus on mastering R? Or would it be better to make Python a priority? If you already know one or both of these languages, which ones should you focus on next? Are there up-and-coming tools?”
Davis continues, “There are two top tools that data scientists and analysts use, and one of them is R. [Python is the other.] Created in 1995 by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, this open source language is meant for data analysis and data visualizations. R has an active user community, and there are many R packages designed for applying the language to particular analytics problems. This language has attracted the attention of enterprises as well. Perhaps the best illustration of this is Microsoft’s acquisition of Revolution Analytics in January 2015. The company offered a commercially supported enterprise platform around the R language.”
She goes on, “Scala combines functional and object-oriented programming. It works with both Java and Javascript. It is the hot language to learn right now, since organizations aspire to work with real-time data. That’s because it is an implementation language of many of the technologies that enable streaming data such as Apache Spark and Apache Kafka. The O’Reilly 2015 Data Science Salary Survey noted that Scala use increased by 10% in 2015… While not used for big data, SQL (Structured Query Language) remains a hugely popular tool among data analysts. The O’Reilly survey noted that 68% of survey respondents said they use SQL. SQL is a standard language for relational database management systems, and RDBMS is still where so much traditional enterprise data resides. So SQL remains an essential tool for enterprise organizations.”
Read the rest of Davis’s list here.
Photo credit: Scala