7 ms·

Learn data science in your browser

244 points by emre 12y ago

vikp 12y ago
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
- Splendor 12y ago
  Thanks for building a great resource.
- jackmaney 12y ago
  This looks absolutely beautiful. Will there be a way for users to create and add missions of their own?
  - vikp 12y ago
    Thanks! That's a great idea, and would be good to build out in the medium term. Right now, content is the main bottleneck, and I'd love some help. If anyone is interested in talking, shoot me an email (vik@dataquest.io).
- tomlock 12y ago
  This looks great vik! Good work!
- barry-cotter 12y ago
  It's great that you're doing this. I'm really thankful. In the ...tooltip there's this text > Hey there, Welcome to DataQuest! If you’ve got any questions or feedba… I have no idea how to expand that. I can't scroll within it and clicking on it doesn't expand it.
  - vikp 12y ago
    Strange, you should be able to click on it to expand. I'll look into it.
- coolandsmartrr 12y ago
  Would you kindly share what resources you used to teach yourself data science?
  - vikp 12y ago
    Too long of a list to post here, but I did write a blog post about it a while ago. I need to update it, but these are still relevant: http://www.vikparuchuri.com/blog/resources-for-learning-statistics-and/ http://www.vikparuchuri.com/blog/resources-for-learning-stat... .
- lateguy 12y ago
  This looks great, vik.
- zarify 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
- me_bx 12y ago
  Feedback: the text of the left hand-side panel (instruction area) is light-gray and too thin to be readable on my 14'' screen, I had to play with the console to fix this. You may benefit from staying away of fashionable design trends and focus on usability. Otherwise thanks for setting this source up, looks great (and very usable besides the problem noted above).
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
ffumarola 12y ago
Great work Vik! Nice to see you getting a lot of great feedback and attention.
jonalmeida 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.
radhouane 12y ago
It is very similar in concept to http://coderscrowd.com http://coderscrowd.com. Good job
jalcazar 12y ago
Looks very good and definitively more affordable than datascience@berkeley. Thanks! Looking forward to use it
jsonne 12y ago
This is really incredible!
brianberns 12y ago
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.
- IndianAstronaut 12y ago
  The whole reason they built so many data tools in Python though is because R can be a pain to program in.
- vikp 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    I'm curious what reseources you used to learn R. I've had it on my list of to-learns for awhile.
    - jonwachob91 12y ago
      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
  - baldfat 12y ago
    I find it funny how Anti-R the Python community can be. Why was the original poster down voted for saying a question about the choice of Python. It was a good question. Python is a good language for data science is why and also people like the language. R is also a great choice for a language and Revolution Analytics just got acquired by Microsoft. I don't understand why Python community says it is hard to write great performing programs and deploy with R. It is by far the most used language in data science and statistics (Open Sourced and possible everything else). If you look at Revolution Analytics and RStudio's Shinny it is very easy to deploy efficient and amazing apps right now.
nkangoh 12y ago
Excellent website. What did you use for the front-end, is it based off a template? It looks great!
- vikp 12y ago
  Thanks! The frontend is written in javascript, and uses angular. Design is based on bootstrap. Frontpage is a modified template, rest is custom.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
neo_optimus 12y ago
This website looks great. Hopefully sites like these will help the new comers in data science to jump start their education.
- hsparikh 12y ago
  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/#/
TheAceOfHearts 12y ago
Small suggestion, you're still using the Yeoman favicon, you should add your own ;).
ycaspirant 12y ago
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).
- joelthelion 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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
- vikp 12y ago
  A few reasons: - Python3 makes some concepts, like unicode, division, the print function, etc, simpler to understand. - Almost all major packages (only scrapy doesn't that I can think of), including the scientific stack, are compatible with 3. - The trend towards 3 seems to be accelerating. 2 isn't going away anytime soon, but I'd like this content to be relevant for some time. Ultimately, they aren't that different, and I may have a section listing out what you need to do to switch between them.
jjsz 12y ago
Is there a javascript version a la freeCodeCamp?
- jarcane 12y ago
  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!
rbxs 12y ago
That's the first course I actually like. And it's free too!
sw00 12y ago
This is really incredible. Thank you.
bouh 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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!
Flimm 12y ago
I somehow missed the "no sign-up required" in the front page, because of the login link.
fatolutoye 12y ago
I just finished the first two missions. Amazing!!!
jarcane 12y ago
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.

244 points by emre 12y ago

vikp 12y ago

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

Splendor 12y ago
Thanks for building a great resource.
jackmaney 12y ago
This looks absolutely beautiful. Will there be a way for users to create and add missions of their own?
- vikp 12y ago
  Thanks! That's a great idea, and would be good to build out in the medium term. Right now, content is the main bottleneck, and I'd love some help. If anyone is interested in talking, shoot me an email (vik@dataquest.io).
tomlock 12y ago
This looks great vik! Good work!
barry-cotter 12y ago
It's great that you're doing this. I'm really thankful. In the ...tooltip there's this text > Hey there, Welcome to DataQuest! If you’ve got any questions or feedba… I have no idea how to expand that. I can't scroll within it and clicking on it doesn't expand it.
- vikp 12y ago
  Strange, you should be able to click on it to expand. I'll look into it.
coolandsmartrr 12y ago
Would you kindly share what resources you used to teach yourself data science?
- vikp 12y ago
  Too long of a list to post here, but I did write a blog post about it a while ago. I need to update it, but these are still relevant: http://www.vikparuchuri.com/blog/resources-for-learning-statistics-and/ http://www.vikparuchuri.com/blog/resources-for-learning-stat... .
lateguy 12y ago
This looks great, vik.
zarify 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.
me_bx 12y ago
Feedback: the text of the left hand-side panel (instruction area) is light-gray and too thin to be readable on my 14'' screen, I had to play with the console to fix this. You may benefit from staying away of fashionable design trends and focus on usability. Otherwise thanks for setting this source up, looks great (and very usable besides the problem noted above).
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

ffumarola 12y ago

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

jonalmeida 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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.

radhouane 12y ago

It is very similar in concept to http://coderscrowd.com http://coderscrowd.com. Good job

jalcazar 12y ago

Looks very good and definitively more affordable than datascience@berkeley. Thanks! Looking forward to use it

jsonne 12y ago

This is really incredible!

brianberns 12y ago

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.

IndianAstronaut 12y ago
The whole reason they built so many data tools in Python though is because R can be a pain to program in.
vikp 12y ago
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 12y ago
  I'm curious what reseources you used to learn R. I've had it on my list of to-learns for awhile.
  - jonwachob91 12y ago
    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
- baldfat 12y ago
  I find it funny how Anti-R the Python community can be. Why was the original poster down voted for saying a question about the choice of Python. It was a good question. Python is a good language for data science is why and also people like the language. R is also a great choice for a language and Revolution Analytics just got acquired by Microsoft. I don't understand why Python community says it is hard to write great performing programs and deploy with R. It is by far the most used language in data science and statistics (Open Sourced and possible everything else). If you look at Revolution Analytics and RStudio's Shinny it is very easy to deploy efficient and amazing apps right now.

nkangoh 12y ago

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

vikp 12y ago
Thanks! The frontend is written in javascript, and uses angular. Design is based on bootstrap. Frontpage is a modified template, rest is custom.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

neo_optimus 12y ago

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

hsparikh 12y ago
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/#/

TheAceOfHearts 12y ago

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

ycaspirant 12y ago

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).

joelthelion 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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
vikp 12y ago
A few reasons: - Python3 makes some concepts, like unicode, division, the print function, etc, simpler to understand. - Almost all major packages (only scrapy doesn't that I can think of), including the scientific stack, are compatible with 3. - The trend towards 3 seems to be accelerating. 2 isn't going away anytime soon, but I'd like this content to be relevant for some time. Ultimately, they aren't that different, and I may have a section listing out what you need to do to switch between them.

jjsz 12y ago

Is there a javascript version a la freeCodeCamp?

jarcane 12y ago
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!

rbxs 12y ago

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

sw00 12y ago

This is really incredible. Thank you.

bouh 12y ago

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 12y ago
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 12y ago
  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!

Flimm 12y ago

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

fatolutoye 12y ago

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

jarcane 12y ago

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.