Software Skills
We teach Python currently and may extend this to other languages. A good knowledge of a programming language helps you develop problem solving skills and automate the boring stuff. With Python and a few libraries you can build:
Simple automation tools
Desktop applications
Web applications.
Interactive Games
Data science applications
Knowing a programming language and a few libraries are great starting points. They are necessary but not sufficient. To become a developer, you also need to learn:
how to read a description of the problem and figure out how to solve it using Python
How to structure your program into a set of reusable modules (functions or objects)
How to write the code and test it
How to rewite the code to make it easier to understand and more efficient
How to test the code to make sure that the functionality is implemented well
How to package and host your application
We plan to teach you not only programming but a little bit of all the above.
Data Skills
Learning how to deal with data is one of the most important skills. In fact over 70% of the effort in certain applications is spent in collecting, cleaning and converting data. In this course, we plan to teach the following:
How to gather data from several sources – text files, websites, RSS feeds, databases
How to clean the data, convert it into various formats like JSON, CSV etc for ingesting into databases
How to import data into SQL and other data stores
How to query the data
How to filter data using a variety of tools
How to export selectively in various formats
Data Skills are a pre-requisite to learning how to build applications of ML and AI.
Data Science Skills
Data Science is an umbrella term to cover a wide variety of related topics to build data driven applications. These include
Data skills (mentioned in the Data Skills course)
Feature engineering (identifying the important features of data useful for a specific applications)
Machine learning (a set of algorithms for building a variety of applications like predictors, recommenders, anamoly detectors etc.)
Deep learning (a specialization of Machine learning for solving problems with neural networks)
Data Science is one of the emerging areas for building new generation of applications. The demand for Data Science and Data Skills far exceeds supply currently and many Data Science jobs pay much higher than other jobs.
To learn Data Science you need to be good at a programming language, acquire data skills and understand how to work with Machine Learning and Deep Learning libraries.