Try QwikLabs

For anyone curious about #DataScience, this from Qwiklabs is the best learning material I’ve come across.

Qwiklabs is a web app offering training labs. The labs generally take me about half as long as indicated, with the occasional extra-tough or extra-easy lab taking more or less time. It will vary according to your experience of a certain niche within data engineering.

For $55pm you can subscribe to get unlimited credits. This is a remarkably good deal considering the price of 4000 credits is normally north of $100, and each course (5–10 courses comprise each Quest, which is where you get a certificate) spends 1–10 credits.

Back to the lab linked above, ie the one that inspired me to write this post. In the lab you’re given access to Hive, and Ganglia, two rather niche tools that would normally be out of reach to anyone not working as part of a well-funded data team. In particular the Hive section is very rewarding:

• words that increased in popularity
• most popular words of different length
• most popular words overall

I can’t recommend Qwiklabs enough. Compared to some other sites which have no way of connecting a course you’ve undertaken, onto a LinkedIn profile, these are super-useful courses.

Note 1: Qwiklabs understandably has copy-paste disabled and you can’t even select the text you’re reading. This sometimes makes it hard to make notes as you’re obliged to type them out by hand. But it forces you to type out the code, and this is a stringent step taken by almost no other training sites. The closest I think of is “Learn You Node” in which you’re actually inhabiting a Bash terminal and typing out codes, never copy-pasting from window to window.

Note 2: Natural Reader is super useful.Natural Reader can provide some help here as you’re able to have Siri or some other voice read the article back to you, e.g. whilst having to watch another window for a VM to be provisioned.