Question about learning Python

During Covid, UofM was offering free Python courses through Coursera. I don't recall exactly how to get to it, but you could try that route with your umich.edu account if you have one.

Edit: Try this link - https://online.umich.edu/coursera-for-students/

Hey OP, try out codecademy.com. They have a python course that you can earn a cert in along with other programming languages if you'd like. And it's free!

Python happens to be the specialty of U-M coding MOOCs offered on Coursera and edX. Dr Chuck Severance is a superstar in this field, and his Python for Everybody series is one of the most popular MOOC series of all time. Python 3 Programming is also an option that goes into slightly more depth (neither assumes background knowledge of python) and was created by, among many, Paul Resnick, who is now assistant Dean at the School of Information.

Best of all...the certificates are freely available to UM alumni, students, faculty and staff through online.umich.edu

Have you tried Google Data Studio aka Looker Studio? It does all of the back end work for you so you can focus on the visualization piece. Tableau is my favorite data visualization software, but Looker Studio is free.

Check this coding course database out:

https://reprorehabdb.usc.edu

It has courses for everything from basic to advanced Python.

Also, YouTube is a great resource for coding if you can find channels that fit what you want to learn.

Grab it by the head and not the tail.

I think it depends on how you best learn. I took a Python class at a local community college because I learn best in a small, in-person class vs. a massive class or just online resources. From there, it was easier to pick up the other things (like visualization) using web resources or books.

I feel like these 24" pythons are the only real contribution I can make to this thread.

You're welcome.

I'm also an old programming/data visualization dog try new learn new tricks (Python) to keep up with the younger generation.   I've tried starting Python on my own a few times, but my optimal learning style requires that someone holds my hand through the initial spin up phase.   I also found it extremely frustrating when first dabbling with Python that setting up my environment to be successful was woefully difficult for this neophyte.   

Thanks to everyone for suggesting the UM Coursera option.   It looks like that's the perfect venue for me to dive into Python.

Python is a good tool for a lot of programmatic solutions so you're in the right place.  If you're into web scraping I'd look into Scrapy and BeautifulSoup, and if you want to focus on data analysis and visualization check out Pandas.

In terms of learning python more generally I'd suggest any of the courses suggested here, RealPython, LearnPython.org, etc.  For your use case you don't need to pay for a course IMO - yes you'll learn better programming approaches with a course but it sounds like you mostly want to write quick-and-dirty scripts to process data sets and scrape sites.  You can pick up those skills mostly working off tutorials and reading the documentation for various libraries.

Good luck!

I’m my personal experience R is easier to learn than Python but YMMV. I also generally prefer Tableau to both for data visualization since I’m not artistically minded enough to customize my own visualizations and the tableau templates are easy to work with. 

I'm a Quality Engineer for a large software company and just recently started using Python to code our Selenium test scripts.  Unfortunately all of the training materials that we use are internal to the company so I can't share. 

I will say, however, that if you have a basic knowledge of programming logic it is really simple to learn.  When I was introduced to programming in 2011 at University of Cincinnati we used Java and C#.  In my opinion, Python is simpler to follow, but keep in mind everyone has a preference.  At my company we can use either Eclipse or Pycharm to write our code.

I'd download Anaconda because it includes and sets up the basic packages you'll need for what you want to do. Within Anaconda, you'll open Spyder, which will be your console, to edit your .py files and also view variables in a spreadsheet like format, or display the graphics.

You say you don't have programming experience, but you also seem to know what you want to do. So I'd say a lot of the "learn python" things will start with extremely simple things like writing "hello world", what you might want to do is look for youtube tutorials for Matplotlib and Pandas, which will be visualization and data libraries, and also Numpy and Scipy, which are like the fundamental operations you'll do on the data.

If you get stuck on something, trying looking for an answer on StackExchange.

just a note from me, my son who is a grad student that just finished a BioStats graduate course centered on R, and almost every professional biostatistician I know.

don’t use R. do yourself a favor and delete the program.

once that is done, purchase GraphPad Prism, and charge the cost to your company. $260 per year or thereabouts. easy to use, same if not more options, produces publication quality figures that are highly editable as far as looks, and don’t need to know codes/syntax etc. GraphPad also has a free trial subscription so you can play with it and learn it before deciding to purchase.

I learned python back in 2005 using the free e-book "Dive Into Python" (available online).  I found it easy, but I was an experienced programmer.  I'm not sure if a newbie would find it too difficult, but you can check it out for free.

There’s always Coursera, but I would prefer to avoid paying if possible.

You don't have to pay.  You can audit the course for free.  Paying just gives you a certificate.

You mean programming in FORTRAN using punch cards at NUBS is no longer a good entry point?

Bummer...

Another site I haven't seen referenced yet here is freeCodeCamp.  Good luck all.