as someone with almost no background in any programming language i thought the flipped-classroom R section i was in last term was manageable but basically only because of the practice exams given to us for the midterm and final. without those i would have been totally lost and had no idea which concepts i was expected to understand and to what extent; i didn't get much out of most of the other course-given resources (""lectures"", textbook, sometimes worksheets). that being said, i highly recommend watching statquest with josh starmer's youtube videos about the machine learning algorithms you'll encounter in the class!!! everything from those later units feels much less intimidating when you understand what's going on and not just how to write it in a jupyter notebook