So, you decided you want to get into Data Science. You go ahead and Google for hours – if not days – how you can learn the basics of data science, materials you can use to study, and courses and bootcamps you can take that will improve your chances of landing a job once you’re done.
All of that is great; the only problem is that you will end up with millions of results if you try to Google data science courses or materials. How can you choose what is good and what’s not? What’s worth your time, and what will be a waste?
I asked myself all these questions and more when I started my data science journey. I was overwhelmed with the amount of information out there about how to become a data scientist, what you need to learn, and what you should do. I spend hours upon hours looking through courses, tutorials, and books, trying to grasp the fundamentals of data science.
I know I am not the only one who has been – or is going – through this challenge. I know that everyone has different preferences of what works for them; what works for me may not work for someone else, and vice versa. Nevertheless, I wanted to put on a simple guide covering 5 online data science courses that have great reviews and give you a good place to start your learning journey.
I chose these courses because all of them can be taken for free from the comfort of your home. Not everyone can afford to go to thousands of dollars bootcamps, or they just may not have any in their area. You can go through all the materials of these courses for free – audit them – or pay a decent fee to get a certificate at the end.
№1: IBM Data Science Professional Certificate
The first course on this list is by IBM. IBM has always been in the lead when it comes to advancing technology; they always had great teams and resources that others can use to learn all the different types of technology, such as web development, app development, and even quantum computing.
IBM offers a professional certificate program that takes you from a data science newbie to a data science pro through 9 individual courses that you can take at your pace. The course provides hands-on experience and real-life problems that can help you build up a strong portfolio.
In this certificate program, you will learn the basics of programming, data science, and Machine Learning, how to use Jupyter notebooks, interact with databases using SQL, efficiently visualize your results and learn the latest advances in the field.
5 Data Science Programming Languages Not Including Python or R
№2: Harvard Data Science Professional Certificate
Next up, we have another certificate program offered by Harvard University. Harvard is one of the most prestigious schools in the world, and though not everyone can attend it, anyone with a curious mind can take this course and if they want a certificate from Harvard.
This certificate program consists of 9 courses that use the R Programming language to cover data science basics. You will also learn the mathematical background behind data science, Git and version control basics, and some fundamental knowledge for every data scientist, such as Unix/ Linux system interactions.
What’s really good about this certificate is how each course uses a case study to explain the main concepts and ask the real questions you need to be familiar with to build a successful data science portfolio.
№3: John Hopkins Data Science Course
John Hopkins University offers a 10-course data specialization program that goes through everything you need to become a data scientist, from the basics of programming using the R programming language to algorithms that form the field of machine learning.
My favorite thing about this set of courses is how it has courses specified for essential yet often rushed concepts, such as building a good development environment, dealing with markdown and Github, and using RStudio. Moreover, the two courses about cleaning and collecting data and EDA cover all you need to extract useful information from your data and hence get accurate results in the end.
This certificate also sheds some light on the field’s research side and how you can generate reproducible data Science research. As a person in academia, it’s always nice to see a data science online course the points to academia instead of focusing solely on industrial usages.
№4: University of Michigan Applied Data Science with Python Specialization
If you want to get into data science, and more particularly natural language processing, the University of Michigan offers a great 5-course program that focuses on the applied aspects of data science.
Although this set of courses is not for natural languages per se, it does have two courses that focus on essential natural language processing concepts, mainly text mining and social network analysis. These courses use Python as the main programming language to cover the basics of data science. It will also go deeper in detail about the different Python packages used often to build applications.
The course designers suggested that you take the course in this order, introduction to data science, applied plotting, applied machine learning, and then text mining and social network analysis. If you complete all 5 courses, you can pay a fee to get an official certificate.
№5: Dataquest Data Scientist Career Path
The final set of courses in this list is the data scientist career path from Dataquest. Dataquest is probably one of the most famous online resources for everything data science; whether you want to learn R or Python, the website has courses for people of different levels.
The data science career path contains many courses that cover everything you need in-depth, from programming basics to databases, to visualization, to maths and statistics, to more technical algorithms for machine learning and deep learning.
The curriculum offered by Dataquest is designed to find everything you need to learn in one place, you won’t need to go elsewhere to continue your learning process. Which saves you a lot of time and effort.
Final thoughts
Becoming a data scientist may seem like a challenging task. To be completely honest, it is not easy; just like any other learning journey, it will take time, practice, patience, and perseverance. But the thing it won’t need is a degree.
Many think that to become a data scientist, you need to go to school or attend a Bootcamp. Both options are costly and not feasible for everyone. Luckily, you can gain the knowledge you need by taking online courses covering all the fundamentals of data science without leaving the comfort of your couch or going bankrupt.
There are many resources available online that you can use to learn data science, so many that it’s very easy to get overwhelmed and lost trying to find the resource that will work best for you.
My sole purpose in writing this article is to help you find a good place to start learning the different data science branches. The 5 courses I presented in this article are not the only ones you can use. Still, they are ones that helped many data scientist build their knowledge base, construct their portfolio and kickstart their new career, and hopefully, they will do the same for you.