I am doing the following udemy course:
https://www.udemy.com/course/neural-network-understanding-and-building-an-ann-in-r/
and the instructor installs R version 3.5.7 saying 'download the latest version' but while following along, I found that version 4.0.2 is out and I am wondering if there are any compatibility issues between the 2 versions like python 3 and 2.
Which version should I download if I wanted to keep up with the course ?
and can I have multiple versions installed on my Linux machine and alternate between them ?
Also how much of a difference is there between the 2 versions?
Edit: Ok thanks everyone, ill install 4.0.2 and if I face any issues ill install 3.5.7 too. Also I found the course for free on a subreddit called freeudemycoupons if anyone is interested
This is very interesting question! I think that for online courses it's usually OK to use a slightly newer version of R. It is very unlikely (however, of course, not impossible) that an online course would use some feature that could be undergoing significant changes at that time. If you want to be sure about all new features and changed behavior in different R versions, you can read the official changelog.
Of course, one should be very careful when updating R in production, especially changing major version. It requires a lot of testing that everything runs correctly and you get proper results. But in online course you will probably get similar results and you can go on. And if you still get stuck, you can always ask here at Stack Overflow (or Stack Exchange: Data Science, AI) at no cost.
And for installing multiple versions of R on Linux you can use RStudio's instructions, which are pretty useful for various distributions and RStudio supports multiple versions and makes switching quite easy.
These threads could be useful: