Everybody wants to do machine learning these days. Machine learning, data science, artificial intelligence, deep learning, neural network — these have become some of the most used phrases in the tech space today. I’m not saying it’s particularly bad, but it definitely gets scary for somebody who doesn’t really know what all this means but wants to get into the rat race.

When you think about it, from a software developer’s point of view, these are just different types of software or applications you work on, but with more math involved. I know I’m oversimplifying what data science is, but for somebody who doesn’t have a mathematics or statistics background, it is very difficult to understand the jargon initially. I’ve been there, and I’m still being there to be honest. I still don’t completely understand what I’m doing. I’m learning on the job, I guess.

But today, I want to help some fellow noobs get into the world of data science by looking at a few awesome courses you can take online on Udemy. Now, I want to be frank and admit that I have personally taken a couple of these courses myself initially, and they helped me in understanding what everything means and how to get started. The most difficult or scary part for a developer could be being clueless about how to begin the journey. I started thinking about revisiting your mathematics from school, or taking some statistics classes, and stuff like that. But I later understood and realised that I could just learn all that at home by going online.

Most data science tutorials or courses you find will expect you to have some sort of programming experience. It’s awesome if you already know programming languages such as Python or R, but if not, at least the knowledge of any object oriented programming language would suffice. And if you’re a true beginner to programming, I would highly recommend taking a look at a few Python programming courses before foraying into data science or machine learning. And when I say these courses are for beginners, I don’t mean absolute beginners to development or programming, but data science beginners.

So these courses that I’m listing here are going to help you kick start your journey into data science, and on the way, you can figure out what all gaps you need to fill. So let’s get started.

Data Science A-Z™: Real-Life Data Science Exercises Included

This could be considered as a comprehensive course on data science. In this course, you’ll learn everything from SQL queries to data mining in Tableau and some basic machine learning algorithms. If you’re thinking of entering the data science world, this could be a good starting point. This course is created by the awesome team over at SuperDataScience. I’m a fan of these people, because my first machine learning course was created by these guys. They explain everything well, give you some solid examples, and in general, get the point across.

Because this is “Data Science A-Z,” you not only get introduced to machine learning algorithms, but also other less known parts of data science, such as getting data ready for processing, using SQL, and even Tableau. You’ll get a good 360 view of data science. It’s a given that this course will only introduce you to the basics of all these tools and technologies, but that is just what you need at this stage. Once you have the basics right, you can go ahead and explore more or decide to specialise in one particular area of data science. Right now, this course has 21 hours of video content and is on sale for $18.99. If you’re interested, check it out on Udemy over here.

Machine Learning, Data Science and Deep Learning with Python

This course, as the name suggests, is all about machine learning and deep learning. You’ll be introduced to Tensorflow and Keras. You’ll also be learning a few classification algorithms and a chart plotting library in Python called MatPlotLib. If image classification and sentiment analysis give you the kicks, you can consider adding this course to your list.

You need to make sure you have a little bit of programming knowledge. And it’s really good if you know Python programming, because most of the stuff in this course (in most other courses on this list as well), are based on Python. So if you don’t know Python, make sure you learn that first. There are many courses for that as well on Udemy, Coursera, and you can find many free tutorials on YouTube as well. Anyway, if you’re interested, this course has 14 hours of video, and is on sale for $18.99. You can check it out on Udemy here.

R Programming A-Z™: R For Data Science With Real Exercises!

This is another awesome course by the SuperDataScience team. You can consider this course as an introduction to the R programming language, but tailored for data science. Also, this isn’t just an introduction to the R programming language. It has proper language tutorials, something you would really appreciate if you’re planning the next few years of your career with R, or just want to take a deep dive into R. This course is impressive for both cases.

In this course, you’ll be exposed to financial and statistical problems, and lessons on how to solve those problems with the R programming language. It’s going to be interesting because R isn’t like every other programming language. Especially if you’re taking this course after you finish some other course in Python, you’re going to see some really cool differences. I say cool differences because some things are super easy to do with R.

Anyway, if this sounds interesting to you, then check out the complete course here on Udemy. The course is on sale right now for $18.99, and you get 10.5 hours of video content on demand.

Complete Guide to TensorFlow for Deep Learning with Python

Well, the name says it all. This is an all-in-one course to get started with TensorFlow with Python. If you don’t know, TensorFlow is a neural network maintained by Google. You’ll learn how to write Python code for TensorFlow. But before you can start the coding part, you’ll be introduced to what neural networks are. Once you understand what they are and how they work, you can start the coding part of the tutorial. And this structure, according to me, is pretty good. Because it’s kind of logical to understand how stuff work before going on to use them.

In this course, you’ll be learning how to use various algorithms such as time series analysis, classification, regression, convolution, and much more. So yeah, it’s pretty interesting. This course is on my to-do list for now. I’ll be taking this up pretty soon. If you’re interested, you can sign up for the course here on Udemy. This is also on sale for $18.99, and you get a good 14 hours of on demand video tutorials.

Data Science and Machine Learning Bootcamp with R

This is another course which is an introduction to the R programming language, but with a focus on data science and machine learning. In this course, you’ll learn a lot of things about R, starting from the simple steps of installing the programming language on your local machine, all the way up to reading different types of files in R and creating data frames. There will also be some tutorials about visualisations, data manipulation, and machine learning algorithms. If you’re a first time R developer, or are thinking of getting started with R, this could be a good first step. If interested, have a look at it here. It provides a whopping 18.5 hours of video content and is on sale for $18.99 right now.

These are a few of the courses I found to be quite interesting on Udemy for data science and machine learning. By no means these are the very best courses or must take courses. I just found them to be interesting for what they offer. If you want to me to collate such a list with Coursera or YouTube (free courses), let me know in the comments and I’ll get right to it. That might actually push me into finishing another course on YouTube, maybe?