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David Miller

3y ago

Accountant → Data Scientist | Writing about the business of data science. Helping you create impact with data and machine learning.

The Two Courses I Took To Get Started In Python

There are so many free courses in Python and data science, it's almost impossible to choose the best.

The secret?

It doesn't matter. The most important decision is the decision to start as soon as possible. The second most important decision is to break through learning plateaus from there.

I started with these two and if I had to start over, I'd choose them again in a heartbeat.

#1: edX - Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python

A gentle introduction that blends computer science fundamentals with Python-specific practice.

  • Computer science foundations

  • Simple algorithms

  • Testing and debugging

  • Algorithmic complexity

  • Data structures

#2: edX - Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science

Keep the momentum by diving right into the second course in the sequence.

  • Graphs and graph optimization

  • Dynamic programming

  • Plotting with the pylab package

  • Probability, Distributions

  • Monte Carlo simulations

  • Curve fitting

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