There's been a lot of discussion regarding the significant gap between the lectures from weeks 1 and 2 and Programming Assignment 1 in the R Programming class on Coursera.

If you're not familiar with R and you're not familiar with programming concepts (sometimes even if you are), Programming Assignment 1 can feel like you're getting thrown in the deep end of the pool after a 5 minute lesson on how to swim.

I've created a practice programming assignment that should help bridge the gap. It walks you through some basic concepts and ultimately helps you create a function bringing those concepts all together. It does not provide a solution for Programming Assignment 1, but if you can work your way through this guided example, you should have the tools to complete part 1 of assignment 1. Part 2 and 3 are a little more complicated, but build on the ideas from part 1.

The instructions are available in rmd and pdf formats.

Just unzip the diet_data.zip file into your R working directory so that you've got a folder called 'diet_data' which contains 5 csv files. I've included directions for doing this within R in the instructions.

Hopefully others will find this useful. I'll keep tabs on this thread to answer any questions.