I will be starting my MSBA this Fall and wanted to spend the next few months building my programming skills. I wanted to know if a data camp subscription (costs $75/year on sale) is the best way to do this. I will be a beginner with very limited exposure.
Additionally, how do I practice the skills I’ve built. I’ve heard about kaggle data sets but I don’t know how I can use them.
Any other suggestions about resources or tips in general are welcome.
Videos
Does DataCamp offer Python Certification?
Why take an online Python course?
How long does it take to learn Python?
I don't know what subreddit is best for this post. Sorry if it's not this one.
So I'm a data analyst, not a data scientist. I just finished grad school (not data science) and I'm between jobs and about to move to a new city, so I've been taking the last few weeks to go through Datacamp's material fairly intensely (~4 hours a day) to upgrade my skills before I get my hopes and dreams crushed by the job market.
...
The first thing I noticed about Datacamp was that they did a lot of stuff for me. I'd open up an exercise and most of the code had been written already, with a couple of spaces with '____' where I should fill in the right answer. I thought this was really frustrating, because there was never any point in the process where they explained to me why we needed to perform whatever operation it was. I'm like 50 hours in, and I'm not sure I could do any of this without Datacamp's prompting. I think this is the worst part of the Datacamp curriculum. I feel that I'm paying Datacamp to teach me Python syntax and when to use it (not just how to use it), and I feel like I'm not learning either of those things.
Second, although Datacamp courses offer short video segments that putatively "teach" the course, the exercises were essentially big text boxes. Oftentimes the video and text would be somewhat out of sync, and sometimes it felt like entire sections had been omitted between text and video. This made watching the videos almost completely optional, and considering most of them are shorter than 5 min, there was never enough time to substantively introduce the material anyway.
Third, the exercises rarely feel practical. There are some nice real-world datasets used, but because of what I describe in my first paragraph, it's hard to actually interface with them. You're not really working with them yourself. Beyond that, it doesn't feel like Datacamp spends a lot of time trying to motivate the problem. Why do we need to take this approach, etc. There are often domain-specific considerations that influence how the problem may best be solved, and that stuff is completely omitted. This ends up meaning that these supposedly practical exercises end up anything but.
I had a really long paragraph here about how I dislike their two-part statistics course. TL;DR: I thought the treatment of linear regression was really shallow and incomplete (there's no mention of residuals at all, for example), and I thought leaving out multiple and logistic regression meant it didn't provide enough for students to actually learn how to work with data. I've never worked as a data scientist, but I understand that those two are important. They're already super useful as an analyst.
That's not to say that Datacamp is terrible. I really liked some of the data viz stuff they've got (Seaborn and Bokeh are awesome), and I think their first couple of intro to Python courses are helpful. I've heard great things about their R courses, as well. And Datacamp has got a great platform for what they're doing.
I'm certainly going to finish my month of Datacamp, but I don't think I'll be resubscribing. I know it's kind of a cheap shot, but I feel like I might subscribe to one of their competitor products in the hope that they can teach me more of the syntax and thought process behind this stuff. I'm disappointed to be paying somebody to teach me, only to have to Google what they're supposed to be teaching.
Im in the process of learning Python and what it is exactly…and i was given the link to datacamp to start my journey…and I’ve tried sooo hard but I just can not catch on…and I hate to say it but I feel like the context isn’t that great, everything seems all over the place and it’s just kind of deflating and discouraging…should I check something else out? Has anybody else had this experience???