What I found the best way to learn Python for data science from scratch
Are you interested in learning data science and/or machine learning using Python as a programming language but you have no idea where to start?
To be honest, I also had that same issue when I first decided to switch to the Python language. Today I’ll be sharing with you my experience with learning Python, and what I find the best way to start from zero. As a matter of fact, if I could travel back in time, I would follow this same path for sure.
It is true that internet is full of useful resources for learning Python; you can enroll in online courses, watch tutorials on YouTube, and even attend conferences. But when it comes to learning the basics of a programming language, I believe that nothing beats reading a textbook.
You might ask, why would I want to use a monotonous book rather than intuitive videos available online? The answer is that this particular textbook: “A Whirlwind Tour of Python by Jake VanderPlas”, available for free, covers the pieces and patterns in the Python language that will be most useful to a data scientist using Python (you can’t find this in any online course). It is not a full introduction to the Python language, but it will give you a solid foundation that makes you able to explore data science packages (NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Scikit-Learn, IPython/Jupyter).
The textbook is 98 pages long, and if you read from it for only one hour on a daily basis you will likely finish it in four weeks, more or less.
The author starts off with showing the best way to install Python especially for those who wish to eventually use the data science tools mentioned earlier.
Then, you will have an idea of the essential syntax, semantics, operations, and functionality offered by the Python language, as well as some idea of the range of tools and code constructs.
Finally, this book recommends handful of resources to dig more into Python tools for data science and scientific computing.
But from my perspective, reading only this book is enough because the optimum way to go deeper in understanding Python is neither in reading tons of books nor in watching tutorials for hours, but it is in practice only.
If you wish to improve your Python skills, I suggest taking part in Kaggle Competitions. It is one of the greatest ways to practice on real world problems in machine learning and data science.
