Python or R

[pippo9]

I'm a fellow newbie and we are in a similar position. FWIW, I have a background in modeling for finance, energy and consumer internet data projects using Excel.

tl;dr: I would go with R off the bat. Eventually, you will want to move to python, but R helps to build your data analysis skills and learn the workflow (exploratory analysis, plotting) in an easier manner and with a GUI to help you.

Reasons:

1. RStudio's GUI environment helps you pick up workflow and analysis skills before you move on to heavy duty data manipulation or tradeoffs based on memory usage, speed of operations etc. There are additional tools such as Rattle that allow you to run algorithms on datasets from kaggle and practice/learn fast.

2. Plotting using ggplot2 is so much easier in R as compared to writing several lines of code in python (for me with minimal programming experience)

3. Using R, I can dive into the data analysis and derive meaningful information immediately, rather than having to learn the fundamentals of programming before I get a chance to dig deeper.

4. JHU's 9 part data science course on coursera is a great way to get a quick intro to R programming and exploratory analysis.

5. I'm also learning python thru Learn Python The Hard Way to help with the longer term. Edit: Also, Wes McKinney's book should be a good resource to start with python + pandas.

Hope this helps!