Course review: Python course on Kaggle
This is a course review of the Python course at Kaggle. First, if you are unfamiliar with Kaggle, you should make some time to check it out. There you find great courses for learning Python and Machine learning, data sets to practice on, competitions to submit your solutions to and much more.
Why I like Kaggle is because everything is so neatly arranged for me. No installs, everything is running in the browser, I can pause and come back at any time. Even if I only have 20 minutes, it’s worth opening Kaggle to do some studying because it’s right there where I left it.
So, back to the Python course review. This course is great. If you are an experienced developer / analyst / data scientist but don’t know Python. I think this is the fast track to start to learn the language. The course is not over simplified so the pace is quite good.
For the complete beginner to programming, this could be a bit intimidating but I think most people will find it good as well. Sometimes all the answers to the programming exercises are not found in the course so you will need to google some functions and attributes, just like you have to do in real life.
Python course overview
Kaggle’s Python course is made up by 7 lessons. Each lesson might take 15 minutes to read and then there is the exercise that could take 20 minutes to a few hours. All exercises on Kaggle have a hint and solution so you could just check the solution and move on if that is your style.
This course gives great fundamentals to Python and at least I was eager to continue with the Pandas course next which is the object type that hold’s your data most of the times as a data scientist.
Finally, this is just the start of your Python learning path at Kaggle. See this as a nice intro and continue studying. All courses at Kaggle are for Python, in one way or another.
Facts about Kaggle’s Python course
It’s completely free, like everything else on Kaggle
You run everything in your browser and you can easily continue where you left off.
This course takes about 6 to 10 hours depending on your level of Python when you start.
This is a great starting point for learning Python. Kaggle is a huge site, they love Python and this is there first level course in Python for you. You will not be disappointed.
Instructor is Colin Morris, Data scientist at Kaggle.
Good luck and have fun learning Python!