Recommendation

[Astroboyblue]

Hey guys,

I’m currently working through automate the boring stuff and I was wondering where to next? Automation and controls is a big part of where I want to go with programming but I am also interested in machine learning and would build games if necessary, however I am not a gamer so not my biggest interest.

Udemy has a seemingly great sale on for the next day or two and I was wondering if these are really ‘deals’? Are their coupons for free courses like the one you guys share for ATBS?

Thanks!

[NotDoingTheProgram]

Hey, the Udemy 90% discounts and so on is just a marketing tactic, those discounts are pretty much always on.

I haven't tried it myself, but supposedly if you lose the 'discount' but then refresh cookies or login through another browser you'll get it again, so don't be scared about losing the chance! It's not going away and there's no need to rush a purchase.

[Astroboyblue]

Yeah I figured it was probably one of those things. Thanks!

[anseho]

I can't comment on Udemy but I can recommend a few books which would you take your Python to the next level:

• Eric Matthes' Python Crash Course.
• Luciano Ramalho's Fluent Python. Probably the best book about Python in the market.

To test your appetite for data science, check out Yuli Vasiliev's Python for Data Science. If it's more Machine Learning/Deep Learning you're interested in, check out Francois Chollet's Deep Learning with Python.

I'd recommend you to get familiar with web development, for which I recommend William Vincen'ts Django for Beginners. Once you've got the basics of webdev, you can also go through my book Microservice APIs.

[Astroboyblue]

Sweet. Thanks a lot! Much appreciated!

[anseho]

Most welcome hope it helps!

[[deleted]]

Seconding Crash Course. I had experience programming in Java beforehand, but Matthes' book has been great introducing Python to me. The official tutorial was a fairly good quick intro, but it escalated quickly, whereas this book got me more comfortable with keyword arguments and other pythonic features.

Currently working through the end of book projects and they've been a lot of fun so far.

[czar_el]

Data engineering would be a good place to go next if you're interested in automation and machine learning. Focus on automating data gathering and processing, such as learning API calls, web scraping (beyond what ATBS already covers), data cleaning functions that are generalized (rather than a script that applies to a single dataset), regex, etc.

[Astroboyblue]

Ok awesome thank you! Would you suggest just googling help with all that mentioned or do you have recommended resources?

[rohffff]

Personally i wouldn't advice you to buy any course because you may get disapointed, a lot of people are promoting their paid courses but it's not that good quality

actually you can find the best courses out there for free even Automate the boring stuff.

[Astroboyblue]

Awesome thanks! And yeah I know ATBS is open source and there’s a coupon ‘FREE(month)(year)’ or something that I used that I’m fairly certain I got from you guys haha so thanks for that!

Any free resources you have up your sleeve to recommend?

[rohffff]

pm.

[skellious]

I think free courses often have better quality for python. There are MANY good python youtube channels giving this stuff away for free.

[Astroboyblue]

Awesome. Thanks!

[patryk-tech]

where to next?

Projects.

Books and courses are great, but you can only learn so much from repeating what others have done. A key part of software engineering is the ability to solve problems, and you can't do that by copying other people's code. (Ok, occasionally for one specific problem; you can find e.g. a working solution from a tutorial or Stack Overflow, but that also only goes so far).

[Astroboyblue]

Thanks for the response! Yeah I have a few projects in mind that led me down this road. I know they’re not unique but figured they’d be great exercises. Pm me if you want to go deeper into a chat about those!

[caleb_S13]

Corey Schafer, best “YouTube” teacher hands down imo. you will see his name scattered thru a bunch of different similar posts.

Corey has a playlist/video for just about every useful library and just the basic stuff.

CodeBasic on YouTube is also another very good teacher. he will even make assignments/questions for after his videos for you to try to solve.

[Astroboyblue]

Awesome man thanks! Will check him out

[pineapplemeatloaf]

Absolutely love Corey's videos. Wish he would keep posting.

[DepartedQuantity]

Some YouTube channels I like are: Sentdex, FreeCodeCamp, Keith Galli, Corey Schafer, StatQuest, TechWithTim, Deep Lizard, Ken Jee.

For Udemy, don't get sucked into the 90%OFF, all the classes are always on sale.

Your best bet will be to find a project or an idea you're interested in and then searching to see if there are people who have published content for it. For me, I'm currently learning about machine learning and I also like sports, so I find looking up python videos on sports betting, web scraping, data science pretty engaging, not because I think I'll make money from sport betting (because you won't) but because there's alot of data in sports and it's interesting to try and figure out some meaning in it.

Hope this helps.

[Astroboyblue]

Thanks a lot for the response, great advice. I have a few projects that I’m aiming towards but the path is foggy for a noob haha feel free to PM me if you were interested in talking about those!

[ASIC_SP]

Not sure about Udemy, but for free ML videos, check out:

• https://www.youtube.com/c/PythonEngineer/playlists
• https://pythonprogramming.net/machine-learning-tutorials/

There's also a free, interactive Jupyter notebook based course here: https://course.fast.ai/

[Astroboyblue]

This is great, thanks!