I recently took part in a FutureLearn course about learning how to code for data analysis. I really enjoyed the course and my interest in the programming language python was definitely piqued. I blogged about previous weeks of the course but in this post I want to summarise my experience of the second half and reflect on the end of the course.
Week 3 of the course contained the content that at the outset I was most eager to learn: conditional statements (What if…). As an example we learnt how to write and test this kind of conditional statement:
if condition1:
statements1
elif condition2:
statements2
...
else:
statementsI arrived in the last week of the course and found a lot more to learn. While I didn’t manage to finish all the tasks of the week, I probably got the most inspiration out of this final part of the course. There was one exercise playing with pivot tables that was really interesting and the emphasis on showing us where to find and how to export large open data sets was what I wanted to learn about next.
All in all I learnt a lot during this course and the content and structure worked extremely well. Judging from the comments from others I was in the clear minority as I found the types of data we used rather uninteresting. But the useful list of resources in week 4 has pointed me to new possibilities. At 92% completion and with the last week being the only one which I did not complete fully, I feel the course delivered all I was expecting – and I recommend it if you are keen to try.
While I have plenty to be getting on with from the course materials, I also wanted to have a look around for other open courses and resources to help me learn more.
A quick search has led me to discover some possible next steps:
First, I found http://www.learnpython.org/ . As far as I can see the site covers basic tutorials as well as a tool into which you can enter code straight away.
Another search result led me to https://codeclan.com/ – a inititive which is more generally aimed at helping you learn how to code but also offers a specific Python course https://codeclan.com/courses/python/ . This is a much more committed programme of study and may not offer all the flexibility I am after.
A whole range of courses is also available from https://www.datacamp.com/courses?learn=python_programming including a course that includes a Python Data Toolbox, which sounds really interesting.
A more basic approach to starting with Python is also available via Code Academy https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-python .
Another open course provider, Coursera, also offers a set of courses on programming with Python from the University of Michigan. This is a seven week course which has recently started and covers basics for university students.
Plenty of options available to satisfy my curiosity and enable me to learn more about Python – probably many more that I haven’t yet discovered. One of the interesting aspects of looking at these sites is to find out more about how the techniques I am starting to learn about can be applied and what they are most useful for. I suppose what I really need to do next is to find a question that interest me and get started on my own.