Catch-22: Learning R through “hands on” Projects

I often get told “learn data science by doing hands-on projects” and then I get all fired up and motivated to learn, and then I open up R…. And then I stare at a blank screen because I don’t know the syntax from memory.

And then I tell myself I’m going to learn the syntax so that I can do projects, but then I get caught up creating folders for each function of dplyr and the subfunctions of that and cheat sheets for this.

And then I come across the advice that I shouldn’t learn syntax for the sake of learning syntax – I should do hands on projects.

I need projects to learn syntax and I need syntax to start doing projects.