The best way to learn Python: My Experience
Four years ago, I was having a chat with a friend on how we could project our career as we had just completed our bachelor’s degree. She shared how her lecturer suggested she had her Masters in statistics. It sounded boring to me even though I loved mathematics. A few weeks later, another of my friends spoke to me about machine learning and how it would be cool to try knowing I was good with statistics but not coding. I resented learning to code for as long as I could until I realized that programming scripts were just tools to harness my knowledge and stretch my mind according to Bill Gates.
“Learning to write programs stretches your mind, and helps you think better, creates a way of thinking about things that I think is helpful in all domains” — Bill Gates
Why Python?
One of the first steps and possibly easiest choice was to select the language to learn. I obviously chose the “easiest” programming language to learn for data scientists, according to CoderDojo.
Anyways, straight to the reason you are here. I have tried various Massive Open Online Courses to learn python. Hence, I decided to share my top two resources and personal opinion on which I think is the best.
1. DataCamp
For most new-school data scientists, engineers, and analysts, DataCamp has been a lifesaver. I personally kick-started my data science journey here and it was interesting to learn on this platform because of its excellent user experience from selecting a career track to the gamified approach of teaching, progress tracking, hands-on exercises, resourceful community, and some of its eloquent tutors.
For starters, this is a great place. Be sure to learn the very basics of python on this platform and you would definitely need little help in progressing to the next set of exercises because most of the exercises are mirrored from the previous videos.
Overall, This is my second best platform to learn python. In my opinion, I do not think the hands-on exercises push users to the limit, hence, the learning curve flattens really fast.
2. Crash Course on Python: Google
This course can be found on Coursera but was offered by Google. I think it would be nice to start with a little disclaimer that this is not the easiest place to start learning python, but as the name implies, it’s literally a crash course that pushed me to the limit and I honestly have no regrets.
Christine Rafla delivered this course in one of the most engaging ways by ensuring every concept was understood and found a way to be witty when giving scenario examples.
Overall, this is my best python course. And this is majorly because of the challenging exercises. Each exercise makes you understand how the taught concepts could be applied in solving complex problems and how to use Stack Overflow (LOL).
Bonus
The fastest way to learn python or any programming language is through practice and working on projects. I take on projects from YouTube and whenever I run into errors, I simply google it.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me on LinkedIn.
