Learning Resources

Getting Started

Going Deeper

Data Sources

Having the best skills in the biz won’t mean much if you can’t get your hands on data. Not to worry though, because there are several online resources where you can view and download very interesting data sets to do with as you wish.

My favorite has been Kaggle Datasets, which has a stream of datasets that people have compiled ranging from statistics on video games sales to global temperatures. It’s also got a large community of like-minded data scientists that upload notebooks of their own analysis that you can check out and discuss with them directly.

You can also get some interesting global and government datasets on a wide range of topics from the World Bank or Data.gov

Data Visualization Tools

Creating intuitive and informative visualizations from the insights in your data is a cornerstone of data science. Beautiful visualizations help to tell stories and effectively convey the information that you want your audience, whether it’s a friend or a business executive, to understand in an easy to digest manner.

Tableau and Google Data Studio are some of the top of the line tools to use for creating beautiful dashboards. Also, Flourish charts is one tool that I have come to love because it’s extremely simple to use but also can make very fun graphics.

All of them are free to use. You just have to create an account (can just sign-in through Google) and import one or many data files, which can be simple excel or csv files, and you’re good to go. They take a little getting used to with the various functions but are pretty intuitive after you play around a bit.

To get started, here are some youtube tutorial videos that I’ve found helpful for each tool:

Google Data Studio
Tableau

How to Build a Website Like This

If you’re looking to build a personal website or portfolio like this one, it couldn’t be easier than using the the minimal mistakes theme for Jekyll. It includes responsive layouts that look great on mobile and desktop browsers. As the name implies — styling is purposely minimalistic to be enhanced and customized by you. The set up is quick and easy, and adding pages and content is even easier.

Forking the github repo and following the readme instructions should set you up pretty quickly. Once everything is going, pages can be built easily with plain text markup.

Hosting is easy as well. I currently use github pages, which is a quick set up if you’ve got the website code as a repo on github.

Good luck and keep on learning! #learningislife