Kaggle's "Titanic: Machine Learning from Disaster" [0] is a great place to start. If you're anxious to dive in, go straight to "Getting Started with Excel" [1]

Kaggle's "Titanic: Machine Learning from Disaster" [0] is a great place to start. If you're anxious to dive in, go straight to "Getting Started with Excel" [1] and move on to "Getting Started with Python" [2] Note: I'd strongly recommend the Anaconda Python distribution [3], as it has pretty much everything you need. Also, for immediate feedback on what you're doing with Python, I've fallen in love with Jupyter Notebooks (formerly IPython Notebooks) [4], which you'll have as part of the Anaconda distribution, along with all the other popular Python packages for scientific work. [0] https://www.kaggle.com/c/titanic https://www.kaggle.com/c/titanic [1] https://www.kaggle.com/c/titanic/details/getting-started-with-excel https://www.kaggle.com/c/titanic/details/getting-started-wit... [2] https://www.kaggle.com/c/titanic/details/getting-started-with-python https://www.kaggle.com/c/titanic/details/getting-started-wit... [3] https://www.continuum.io/downloads https://www.continuum.io/downloads [4] http://ipython.org http://ipython.org