
Learn data science in your browser - emre
https://dataquest.io/
======
vikp
Hi everyone:

Very exciting to see this posted here.

I'm the maker of dataquest. I'm a self-taught data scientist/coder, and I
wanted an easier way for people to get into the field.

I've been working on it for the past three months, and I'm really excited to
see people learning with it.

I chose to teach python because it's one of the best first languages to learn,
it's useful outside of data science, and a lot of production data science work
is now done in python.

It's missing advanced content, but I'm working on it. Let me know if I can
help, or answer any questions!

Vik

~~~
zarify
Been having a play and it looks good, although the way that variable
assignment is referred to in some of the problems feels inconsistent and is
sometimes confusing. In some problems you talk about the variable first and
the value second, and in others the value first and variable second.

Also it really pains me to see you recommending using a for loop to count list
members when there's a perfectly good len function there to do it for you. I
can understand the desire to do it from a fundamentals point of view, but it
feels overcomplicated in the crime mission.

Edit: Is it ok to like the video bits but hate then stylus? It feels like an
actual whiteboard or something that drew less artificial (and noisy) lines
would be friendlier. The narration is good :)

~~~
vikp
It's really hard to approach problems from the perspective of a beginner. I
did some testing around using "magic" functions like len vs building
intuition, and it's really important to understand how the things are working.
Otherwise, you can't really generalize the concept easily.

I'll look into the variable assignments more. Making content has been way
harder than I imagined it would be.

I think I need a better graphics tablet -- I got a cheap refurbished one, and
it lags a lot.

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TheAceOfHearts
Small suggestion, you're still using the Yeoman favicon, you should add your
own ;).

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ycaspirant
I'm curious to know what made you decide to teach Python 3 instead of Python
2? (I'm only asking because most courses these days seem to favor teaching
Python 2).

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joelthelion
Because Python3 is the current version of python? If you're starting new
projects, there are very few valid reasons not to use it.

~~~
xasos
A bunch of data sciene material, in particular, is written in Python 2.x, and
it wouldn't be bad to teach Python2 either. You could always use the _future_
command for newer modules as well

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jonalmeida
That's a beautiful website you have there. I find it easier to motivate myself
to learn something when it's pleasing to the eye :)

~~~
bufordsharkley
I couldn't help but think of how much it reminded me of this parody of flashy,
boilerplate sites: ([http://jonhendren.com/](http://jonhendren.com/)). My eyes
kinda glaze over when I see Bootstrappy style (or something similar).

~~~
jonalmeida
The colours compliment each other and it's simple. If I had to be harsh, it
could do without the gliding animations.

The parody site was instantly painful though, I think it was a to do with the
grey/green on white; amusing afterwards.

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bouh
I have thought of something like that for teaching programming language, you
dit it, this is very good ! You should make your tool a generic plateform an
sell it to teaching organizations.

~~~
vikp
Thanks! Do you know of any organizations that want such a platform? There are
a lot of players in the LMS space, like edX, Canvas, etc.

~~~
jonwachob91
It'll be difficult for you to sell the platform.

Follow your own gut, but investors/buyers don't care how great your platform
is. You have no IP so they can pay someone to build another version. Investors
and buyers purchase users.

Get a lot of users on your platform and then consider selling.

That being said, codecademy and code school are both model templates that you
could use to turn this into a business if you'd like that route.

You can also find hacker schools teaching data science (such as iron yard -
[http://theironyard.com/academy/python-
engineering/](http://theironyard.com/academy/python-engineering/)) and see if
they'll be willing to add your curriculum to their pre-course requirements.
You might be able to get them to have students help build our your curriculum
as part of their course projects.

Any kind of media coverage (such as fast co, popular science, etc) will help
garner attention and users.

If you are able to get access to current sports data (nba, nfl, baseball, etc)
and are able to help teach data science around those data sets you could
probably get a lot of motivated but non-cs educated users and media coverage.
That is also a feature you could probably charge a subscription for. I'm
shooting ideas from the hip, so take them and turn them into something that is
more familiar with your background.

Whatever direction you choose to take dataQuest, talk with your potential
users and get their feel. Make a decision to move in a direction that'll have
minimum push-back with maximum achievement of your desired goals.

Focus on user growth and you'll garner the attention of affluent individuals.

Good-Luck and let me know if you need any help or someone to bounce idea's off
of!

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neo_optimus
This website looks great. Hopefully sites like these will help the new comers
in data science to jump start their education.

~~~
hsparikh
Agreed. There are many different components to learning the basics of
exploring, analyzing, visualizing, and interpreting real data.

Checkout Tuva's incredibly easy to use tools to get an idea of how these
concepts can be brought to life for data novices and young learners.

[https://tuvalabs.com/datasets/us_cities__part_i/#/](https://tuvalabs.com/datasets/us_cities__part_i/#/)

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Flimm
I somehow missed the "no sign-up required" in the front page, because of the
login link.

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nkangoh
Excellent website. What did you use for the front-end, is it based off a
template? It looks great!

~~~
vikp
Thanks! The frontend is written in javascript, and uses angular. Design is
based on bootstrap. Frontpage is a modified template, rest is custom.

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ffumarola
Great work Vik! Nice to see you getting a lot of great feedback and attention.

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jalcazar
Looks very good and definitively more affordable than datascience@berkeley.

Thanks!

Looking forward to use it

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rbxs
That's the first course I actually like. And it's free too!

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jarcane
Perhaps the thing I find most impressive about this it's that it runs quite
usably in my phone browser (WP8.1). It's the first one of these I've found
that does.

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fatolutoye
I just finished the first two missions. Amazing!!!

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jjsz
Is there a javascript version a la freeCodeCamp?

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jarcane
I had not actually heard of freeCodeCamp. That looks pretty cool, and will
probably shoot to the top of my list for entry points to JS. Thanks for the
mention!

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radhouane
It is very similar in concept to
[http://coderscrowd.com](http://coderscrowd.com). Good job

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sw00
This is really incredible. Thank you.

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jsonne
This is really incredible!

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brianberns
This looked intriguing, but all the lessons seem to revolve around learning
Python, which doesn't interest me (since I'm already a software developer). I
guess I expected something more science-y like R or maybe Julia.

~~~
vikp
I actually learned a lot of coding with R. It's hard to learn, but once you
do, it's great for hacking up models and trying stuff out.

But, because of R's quirks, it's generally easier to write and deploy
consistent, good-performing code in python. Python code is also more readable,
which makes it easier to collaborate. All of my data science work, including
plotting, is now done in python.

I'm working on more advanced content for dataquest, and thanks for the
feedback.

~~~
noer
I'm curious what reseources you used to learn R. I've had it on my list of to-
learns for awhile.

~~~
jonwachob91
Code School as a free introduction course that'll get your feet wet and use to
a lot of the concepts. It's a nice intro to the O'Reilly book

