This free introductory computer science and programming course is available via MIT’s Open Courseware platform. It’s a great resource for mastering the fundamentals of one of data science’s major requirements.

I shouldn’t have to tell you that programming is an important aspect of data science.

In order to implement computational solutions to data science problems, it is clear that programming is an absolute necessity. Regardless of whether you are visualizing data, performing exploratory data analysis, or implementing machine learning models, and whether you are using existing code bases and libraries or coding from scratch, writing code as a data scientist is required.

But stringing together disparate lines of code found via Google searches shouldn’t be the goal of an aspiring data scientist (or anyone else learning to program). An understanding of computer science principles, computational approaches to problem solving, and the fundamentals of programming, all independent of implementation programming language, should be the goal of anyone with a true desire to really learn how to code.

There are lots of ways to pick up programming and master the concepts of computer science. Obviously, some people will learn better with some approaches than with others. Thorough university courses, including lectures, readings, slides, and assignments, are one such approach.

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