My Learning Journey: The First Month
If you’re still with me, or if you skipped reading the article to get to this point, then let me refresh you briefly. A bored applied mathematics graduate with nothing to do and no prior experience in Python suddenly dreamed of becoming a TensorFlow developer under two months. Here’s a recap my journey to achieve that goal.
During the first month, I familiarize myself with the Python language. How do I do this quickly? The first thing I did is going to hackerrank and immediately practiced with a lot of Python problems. When I get to a problem that I can’t solve on my own, I try to look up solutions online on-the-go. If that too didn’t help, I viewed the solution and tried to understand the concepts I can grasp in this problem.
That’s all I do for two weeks, and by then, I am able to answer most questions, even the ones with higher difficulty without looking at any solutions.
What did I do for the remaining two weeks? I watch free YouTube Python tutorials. You heard it right.
Alright, disclaimer incoming. If you have the opportunity to take formal Python class in a more structured manner, by all means please do so. The three videos I list below are only my personal choice to accelerate my Python learning journey.
These videos are so underrated just because they are “free”, and you don’t get any certificates for completing them. Here are a few great choices:
- ‘Python for Beginners’ by Programming with Mosh. This video is a concise and clear recap of the basic concepts of Python starting from strings, operations, functions, data types (lists, dictionaries, tuples), inheritance, and then finishes the video by making three beginner-friendly projects. The second project is most relevant to my path as it is about machine learning.
- ‘Python for Data Science Full Course’ by edureka! This video covers necessary packages in Python for a solid foundation in data science. At the end of the video, they talk briefly about deep learning in Python using Keras and TensorFlow, so it gives me a sneak peak of what’s to come.
- ‘Data Analysis with Python’ by freeCodeCamp.org. Before we even make models and train them, an often overlooked stage is preprocessing our data. This video focuses more on said part, and emphasizes on gathering data, loading them, cleaning them, as well as making visualizations to draw insights.
While I would enroll in a ‘formal’ Python class in my next studies, these three YouTube videos suffice for now. Just make sure to take notes, write your own codes, as well as trying out different things while you watch along.
I still remember the day I finalized my thesis submission to my university. I sighed in relief as my bachelor studies came to an end. However, boredom quickly overcame me. With nothing to do, and the world swallowed by a pandemic, I desperately seek for a new activity to fill my empty days.
In this post, I’m going to tell you how this pandemic boredom led me to becoming a Google Certified TensorFlow developer in under two months, despite having never coded in Python before. I’ve provided a list of linked study materials that I use to prepare for this exam.
Let’s get started…!
#python #tensorflow #machine learning #data science #deep learning
