How NOT to learn Python for Data Science

Key Takeaways

what up debt nerds quick story before we get started so growing up i was the youngest of three brothers as you can imagine four boys in a household is destined for chaos my three oldest brothers were always getting in trouble and then getting caught by my parents and getting punished and i mean as a kid punishment getting ground to just like the worst thing ever as the youngest i took advantage of this perspective and really just started to learn what my brothers were doing wrong in order to apply that to not get punished so what did i ultimately learn well i ultimately learned skills not to get caught and because i didn't get caught i didn't get punished so with this i hope that you can take away a lot of the key learnings that i had when i failed at learning python and apply that in your journey in learning python for this video today i think it's important to understand where i'm coming from so i'm going to start with my failure story of how i failed at learning python from there we're going to move into what i took away from this how i've upgraded myself and thus moved into learning python successfully and finally i'll just wrap it up with some key takeaways that i have in learning python and you can apply this to any coding language that you want to learn so i started my journey like probably a lot of you going to youtube watching different tutorial series trying to understand the basics of python and from there once i thought i had the the basics i moved into a project at the time i was trying to pursue a business idea of launching a meal prep application so i thought it would be great to learn some sort of web framework which i was going to use django to apply python with and build this revolutionary app that i was going to come up with to plan your meals so what i found whenever i was building this application is i really didn't understand the basics of python and i was trying to apply basic concepts of python into this django web framework which i also had very little knowledge of or operation of how this framework even operated this ultimately led to my demotivation with the project i you know banged my head on the table had many different explicits that i shouted out and it just led me down a row that i didn't like because i wasn't ultimately able to hit the goal that i wanted to with the application i was really demotivated in my learning with python and ultimately led to me stepping away from python for a little bit and really trying to reflect on my learnings and on what i failed at so before we get into my key takeaways from this experience and what i ultimately did to successfully learn python let's have a quick word from my sponsor who's my sponsor you got value out of this video what do you mean i don't have a sponsor awkward so here's a shameless plug for my channel make sure you like and subscribe also if you're interested in learning the basics of python or interested in learning how to set up python your computer i have a couple tutorial series on that which i'll include links above and also links below so getting into successfully learning python i really reflected back on it and the approach that i took was watch a few youtube videos and then go out and try to do this large basically unaccomplishable project and so i broke it down more simply into more smaller goals that i could actually accomplish and learnings that would keep me motivated and build my knowledge level up so first i think it's important that you have some sort of structured learning so youtube tutorial series are great i highly recommend this i also highly recommend that you pick up maybe some books around learning python and some basics of python i like to before i go to bed at night just read books to sort of calm me down and put me to sleep but they also help provide a pathway of understanding what i should be knowing for python to supplement the videos and books i also follow i mean i use medium.com but they provide short little articles that you can read on python and i really feel it's good throughout the day when you have breaks to just pop open these articles and read these different topics and ideas around python that people are using in their everyday lives to solve problems and this really helps reinforce learning some of the things from your videos and also from the books that you're reading next i still recommend getting into doing projects but have more accomplishable projects that you can do i think kaggle.com is an excellent resource if you don't know what you want to do my channel focuses on data analysis and data science so i think that's a good place to go and build different machine learning models or different data analysis tools with python i however like to do and focus on topics that i actually have an interest in and i don't always feel like kaggle has those interested so just for an example whenever i was in my journey one of the facebook groups i'm a part of did a survey and had a bunch of analytical results and a lot of data from that survey i graciously volunteered to do some data analysis on the data set and provide it to the members so that way they could provide it to the group and there was a great learning experience to apply those skills in an area that i was actually interested in and then finally what i've more transitioned to lately and has helped even expose even more what i don't know about python is just teaching others so take the time to go through with others and teach simple concepts to others on python and this really helps reinforce what you're trying to learn so just to reinforce what are the tools to successfully learn python so first of all you have to have the basics how do you have the basics you need to have some sort of structured learning so i really enjoy the youtube tutorial series that are out there i also highly recommend you pick up a few different books that you can read during the night and afternoon addition with the structure learning i like some unstructured learning so maybe consider going to medium.com and signing up for that and using that to supplement with just short articles throughout the day to sort of reinforce what you're trying to learn and then from there projects projects are really important at applying the skills that you're learning from your learnings into actual implementation and that implementation is going to help reinforce your learning and then finally once you're getting comfortable with it i highly recommend you start teaching others you know take the time maybe uh especially the times that we're in skype with somebody a video conference with them and teach them this skill and with that i'm curious with learning and also sharing with others what have you found is most successful in learning python drop in the comments down below so we can share with others as always smash that like button if you got value out of this video consider subscribing if you learn want to learn more about tips and tricks for data analysis and with that we'll see in the next one