This is going to be a journey of me teaching a friend of mine the basics of Data science. But the twist is that he is not from a computer science background, and definitely he doesn’t code. So we’ll start from the basics of programming and try to reach where he can call himself a “Data scientist” 🙂
I’ll be posting all the resources and codes we are going through and i hope this post would be helpful to anyone who chooses the same path and hopefully if we succeed, then anyone can learn the basics of data science by following us.
We’ll start with basic programming constructs and will chose python as the initial language due to it’s similarity with pseudo-code and faster learning curve. Let’s get started!
For getting started with python, Anaconda is a blessing. It is a contains all the necessary python packages, libraries and a cool IDE. And the best thing is its free and it supports all platforms so go ahead, download and install Anaconda for your OS.
For a beginner, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist is a good book. We’ll start with first 10 chapters of the book with a fast pace and then for a much detailed understanding first 13 chapters of Think Python.
I have found another useful and very handy tutorial by J.R. Johansson. It covers most of the concepts we need right now. So after going through this complete notebook, if you think you know all the concepts discussed then we have achieved our first milestone. You can check your understanding by solving the following exercises on lists and strings.