“… Getting your hands dirty with the data set is, I think, far and away better than spending too much time doing reading and so forth,” Silver said in a Q&A wit

“… Getting your hands dirty with the data set is, I think, far and away better than spending too much time doing reading and so forth,” Silver said in a Q&A with HBR’s Walter Frick. I'm in a data science class (hi carlob) right now. This is exactly how we've approached the subject. There were a few readings the first couple weeks to get people up to speed on Python (or scare them away if they didn't have any coding experience), then our homework problem sets have jumped straight into real-world data scraping and modeling. It's been a fantastic way to start learning the field, because after just 3.5-ish weeks I already feel like I have the tools I need to start exploring and fitting rudimentary models to the information I'm collecting. It's exciting and enabling, and I think that's definitely a strength of doing while learning.