Learning

Data Science Educational Resources

NOTE: If you would like to suggest a resource to be added to this page please send a DM to Rocio on Slack with a link to the tool and a short description.

• Please limit suggestions to resources you have had some experience using
• If there is a specific topic you would like to see covered here please let her know as well. This page is a work in progress!

General

• Code Academy
  • Free site for interactively learning to code in many languages (eg. Python, HTML, SQL, Git etc)
  • Highly recommended for absolute beginners to intermediate
• Learn DataSci.com
  • Comprehensive list of online data science courses
• [Ranking of Intro Data Science Courses] (https://medium.freecodecamp.com/i-ranked-all-the-best-data-science-intro-courses-based-on-thousands-of-data-points-db5dc7e3eb8e#.2i595bbl9)
  • Pretty extensive and methodical approach to ranking courses. Definitely check out to find a course that is right for you!

R

• swirl: Learn R, in R
  • Neat interactive way to learn how to do many things in R
• R for Cats
  • Being a cat/cat-lover not a strict requirement. Introduction to R for complete beginners
• Data Science with R
  • Companion Website to the Book with the same name
• Stat 133 at Berkeley
• Advanced R Hadley Wickham's interactive companion for his Advanced R book. If you want to learn how the language actually works (including its weirdo 3-teired OO framework and what's really going on with its lazy evaluation), go here. The metaprogramming aspects are extremely useful (code that writes code!).
  • Writing Fast R Code Crucial. Naive for loops can be real bad in R.

Python

• Learn Python the Hard Way

  • Free interactive 'book' for learning how to code in Python and intended for beginners/intermediate users

• [Learn to Program Coursera Course] (https://www.coursera.org/learn/learn-to-program)

  • Great course for learning how to code in Python. How I initially learned Python

• Pandas Cheat Sheet

  • Very useful to print out and have handy.

Books

• Python for Data Analysis by Wes Mckinney
  • Great resource for learning how to work with the data analysis tools in Python

Data Processing and Cleaning

• [Getting and Cleaning Data] (https://www.coursera.org/learn/data-cleaning)
  • Important Class. Even if you don't code in R you can follow the examples and understand the proper methods and BEST PRACTICES for data processing
• Introduction to reshape2
  • reshape2 is one of the most used packages for transforming data between long and wide formats. Useful to follow along to understand some fundamentals of data transformations

Machine Learning

• Machine Learning Youtube course
  • Many machine learning algorithms and concepts explained very well
• Andrew Ng's Course on Machine Learning
  • Comprehensive introduction to machine learning and underlying mechanisms for various algorithms

Books

• Introduction to Statistical Learning by by Trevor Hastie and Rob Tibshirani - free e-book
  • Must-read for anyone interested in Machine Learning and aimed at a less mathematically inclined audience
  • Has useful labs that can be completed in R
• [Elements of Statistical Learning] (http://statweb.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/) by Trevor Hastie, Robert Tibshirani and Jerome Friedman - free e-book
  • For anyone who wants an advanced treatment of machine learning models and methods

Articles/Blog Posts

• [Approaching Almost any ML problem] (http://blog.kaggle.com/2016/07/21/approaching-almost-any-machine-learning-problem-abhishek-thakur/)

Probability & Statistics

• Kahn Academy Videos
  • Great introduction/review of statistics/probability concepts
• Probability is hard blog series by Allen Downey
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
  • Part 4

SQL

• SQL Zoo

• Extensive interactive tutorials

• SQL Schools from Mode Analytics
  • Thorough explanations with some interactivity

Natural Language Processing

• Gentle Introduction to Topic Modelling
  • Topic Modelling using the popular Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm
• Text Mining in R
  • Manual for various methods in text-mining (pre-processing, term-frequencies, analysis)

Misc

• Git Tutorial
  • Free 15 minute tutorial for getting started with Git
• Web Scraping Tutorial
  • Using python tools including BeautifulSoup

Useful Blogs/Sites to follow

• Data-Tau
  • Trending news in data science and analytics
• Insight's Data Science Blog
• Multi-threaded by Stitch Fix
  • Blog of work and resources from one of the largest data science teams in tech
• Probably Overthinking It
  • Blog By Allen Downey author of multiple useful statistics and coding books