If you have read any of my goal based posts, you should know that I am trying to understand how machine learning works. I really want to do a Kaggle but don’t feel like I have learned enough to start. In the spirit of that, one of my goals for 2021 is to go through and do the Kaggle Courses. The first Kaggle Course is Python.
Python Kaggle Course
Honestly, I was not expecting this to be worth much as it is a free beginners course but it was surprising good. There were a few boogers in it but mostly, it was well thought out. It handled the teaching and administrating the exercises really well. There were hints, in case you got stuck. Mostly meaningful error messages on why you failed an exercise. Finally, there was a solid comedy for a lack of a better word in the examples and exercises. For a course that felt as light as it did, it was really good at teaching the concept.
I was stunned.
There was an exercise that had a divide by 7 bit in it that was a bit frustrating because I did not understand what they wanted but one exercise out of the couple of dozen is a pretty solid track record. Even if it was a bit annoying, I worked through the issue.
The Bad
While this was a really good course, I am not sure how a total novice to programming would handle it. I don’t feel like that is an issue because if you are going to Kaggle for learning to program, you are running uphill at 30,000 feet before you started crawling. If this is you then stop and get yourself a Head First Series book on programming.
Next, if you are a stick in the mud, you might not enjoy the levity of the writing. It is a solid explanation of Python basics. If you only sort of know Python, like me, it will answer some nagging questions about some of the stuff I saw in examples in the past.