A lot of people come on this board wondering whether certain programs are worth the time/effort, so I just wanted to give some quick notes on the ‘Scientific Computing With Python” course on FreeCodeCamp.

The series is taught in 56 segments that are made up of 5-15 minute videos, presented by Charles Severance (“Dr. Chuck”). Each segment has a quiz question that you need to complete to move forward, and some of the segments have optional “additional resources” (which I didn’t do at all). At the end, there are 5 projects that need to be completed to earn the cert.

The videos are presented in a lecture style, which I don’t really care for. Previously I had done a long Programming With Mosh video tutorial, as well as some shorter ones by others, where you see someone live-coding. Those are my preferred learning style. Whereas Dr. Chuck presents a series of PowerPoint slides and marks them up with an e-pen. I personally found it much harder to program along with this style of video.

In order to complete the projects, you need an understanding of Python basics. A lot of the lectures are on stuff like APIs, Regular Expressions, Web Scraping, XML , etc. You don’t need to know any of this for the projects. So about half the series content is what I’d describe as “bonus material” that you can just sit back and watch, and I plan to find a different source when I really want to learn that stuff.

Building projects are really where I learned the most, but that’s probably true of most programs like this.

There are 5 of them:

• Arithmetic Formatter was an easy programming challenge, but the output was tedious. It’s one of those where you have to do a lot of white space counting. Any little extra space or dash will cause the program tests to fail.

-Time calculator was a fun one. It could be programmed in multiple ways, so I had a fun time trying something unique.

-The Budget App was the bane of my existence while I was working on it. The base functionality wasn’t too bad, but the instructions were confusing. So I had to rewrite it a couple times. And the graph you have to build at the end was a very tedious component. Really hated building this thing. My code is a mess, but it works. Learned a lot about classes writing this at least.

-The Polygon Area Calculator was super easy compared the the other ones. Took me a min to figure out one piece of math, but overall took ~30 min to complete.

-The Probability Calc was my favorite. A super fun “simulate this experiment” project. I misunderstood a piece of it (specifically, what to do when too many balls are pulled out of the hat), so my code is a bit crazy. I basically just patched something on to get it working properly when it would be cleaner to rewrite the whole thing. But it works properly as is, so I didn’t bother making it clean.

So TLDR: I didn’t love the lectures, but I learned a lot from the projects. Even though the projects were sometimes frustrating.