Resource Center
===============
Here a links to a variety of data science and business analytics related resources.
General business analytics and data science
------------------------------------------------
* `Analytics Magazine`_ It's published by `INFORMS - the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science `_. They are the premier professional society for analytics and it's inexpensive to join as a student. Full disclosure, I've been an INFORMS member since about 1986 (when it was still ORSA/TIMS). We were doing analytics before it was called analytics. :)
* `Awesome Data Science `_ - giant curated list of data science resources
* There are numerous groups on Reddit related to analytics and data science. These can be very good resources for unvarnished conversations/opinions about careers, grad school as well as technical advice.
- `r/datascience `_
- `r/analytics `_
- `r/OperationsResearch `_
- `r/BusinessIntelligence `_
- `r/DataEngineering `_
Programming tutorial hubs
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
* `Software Carpentry `_ and `Data Carpentry `_ - helping scientists learn to do computational work with R, Python, SQL and other tools
Online courses
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
There are numerous online courses available through DataCamp, Coursera, EdX, Udemy and others. Here's a few Python and R ones I've checked out over the years.
* `Intro to Data Science in Python`_ - I did this short course in Feb 2017 (Coursera UMich). Great fun. If you want a good pandas/python learning challenge, try the assignments.
* `Python for Everybody course`_ - This site includes a bunch of videos and supplementary files. The whole thing was created by a professor at University of Michigan and is meant to be a totally open set of freely available learning materials for Python in the context of data analysis.
* Coursera has some well regarded `R based data science courses `_
Learning R
----------
Online tutorials, books and examples for getting started
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
* `R-bloggers`_- The aggregator for R related blogs.
* `Quick-R`_ - This is a great site dedicated to helping R newbies get over the somewhat steep R learning curve.
* `Cookbook for R`_ - Another great site for learning R. In their words: "The goal of the cookbook is to provide solutions to common tasks and problems in analyzing data."
* `R for Data Science`_ - Free, online version of the book, **R for Data Science** by Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund.
* `The Official R Manuals`_ - These are accessible from the main R Project page in the Documentation section.
* `Contributed Documentation`_ - Many people have written tutorials, books, and other free documentation for various aspects of R. This is part of the magic of R community.
* `Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour`_ - Just what it says.
* `Webinars from R Studio`_- The creators of the hugely popular R Studio package have a ton of learning resources on their site.
* `Teach yourself Shiny`_- A somewhat recent development by the folks at R Studio is something called a Shiny web app. Learn to create interactive, R driven, web apps!
Packages
^^^^^^^^^
The R ecosystem relies on high quality packages and its community of package developers. Here are some
collections of package descriptions and links.
* `RStartHere`_- A very comprehensive and well organized list of packages for doing data science in R.
* `Awesome R`_- Curated list of R packages by category (IDE, data manipulation, etc.)
Learning Python
----------------
Online tutorials, books and examples for getting started
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
* `Software Carpentry - Lessons`_ - Software Carpentry is one of my all time favorite resources for teaching and learning practical programming skills. This link takes you to their list of "Lessons" (really entire mini-courses). In addition to a lesson on Python, you'll find lessons on tons of stuff that is useful for business analytics and data science. Highly, highly recommended.
* `Whirlwind Tour of Python - Jake VanderPlas`_ - Free 100 page pdf and associated Jupyter notebooks for those who want to learn Python for data science use and have some prior knowledge of programming.
* `Python for Everybody - Charles Severance`_ - This is a remixed, freely available, textbook on learning Python to do data analysis.
Blogs and listservs
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
* `Practical Business Python`_ - Super relevant blog for business students learning Python.
* `Pycoders Weekly`_ - Weekly email newsletter. Always has interesting stuff and almost always something directly data science related.
Libraries
^^^^^^^^^^
* `Awesome Python`_ - A curated list of awesome Python frameworks, libraries, software and resources
Statistics
-----------------
If you are rusty on statistics, there's a really good OpenIntro Stats book available as a free online book or you can pay what you want for a paperback copy. It includes R based material.
* `OpenIntro Stats `_
You can also find high quality `free online statistics courses through the Open Learning Initiative `_ as
well as places like Coursera and EdX.
`Cross Validated `_ is a great Q&A forum for all things statistics. Lots of R related
content.
Publicly available data
-----------------------
* `Kaggle Datasets `_ - need to create a free Kaggle account
* `OpenML Datasets `_ - site with many ML resources
* `UCI Machine Learning Repository `_
* `cs109 Resources (2014) `_ - Many links to datasets (as well as links to Python and misc data science stuff)
* `https://github.com/rstudio/RStartHere#data `_ - From the RStartHere site
* `Google Public Data `_
* `Climate Data Online `_
* `USGS `_
* `dataportals.org `_
* `Finding Data on the Internet (from Inside-R) `_
Workflow and reproducible analysis
----------------------------------
* `Reproducible and Trustworthy Workflows for Data Science `_
* `Data Science Workflow: Overview and Challenges `_ - Blog post by Philip Guo who did his dissertation on this topic.
* `Cookiecutter Data Science `_ - "A logical, reasonably standardized, but flexible project structure for doing and sharing data science work."
.. _Analytics Magazine: http://analytics-magazine.org/
.. _Competing on Analytics: https://hbr.org/2006/01/competing-on-analytics
.. _Quick-R: http://www.statmethods.net/
.. _Cookbook for R: http://www.cookbook-r.com/
.. _R for Data Science: http://r4ds.had.co.nz/
.. _The Official R Manuals: https://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html
.. _Contributed Documentation: https://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html
.. _Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour: http://alyssafrazee.com/2014/01/02/introducing-R.html
.. _R-bloggers: http://www.r-bloggers.com/
.. _Webinars from R Studio: https://www.rstudio.com/resources/webinars/
.. _RStartHere: https://github.com/rstudio/RStartHere
.. _Awesome R: https://github.com/qinwf/awesome-R
.. _10 R packages I wish I knew about sooner: http://blog.yhat.com/posts/10-R-packages-I-wish-I-knew-about-earlier.html
.. _Teach yourself Shiny: https://shiny.rstudio.com/tutorial/
.. _Introducing R Shiny web apps | SNAP: https://blog.snap.uaf.edu/2013/05/20/introducing-r-shiny-web-apps/
.. _RStudio Add-ins: https://rstudio.github.io/rstudioaddins/#overview
.. _Software Carpentry - Lessons: http://software-carpentry.org/lessons/
.. _Whirlwind Tour of Python - Jake VanderPlas: https://github.com/jakevdp/WhirlwindTourOfPython
.. _Python for Everybody - Charles Severance: https://www.py4e.com/book.php
.. _Python for Everybody course: https://www.py4e.com/
.. _Awesome Python: https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python
.. _Learning Python - suggestions for business analytics students: http://hselab.org/learning-python-suggestions-and-resources-for-business-analytics-students-and-professionals.html
.. _Intro to Data Science in Python: https://www.coursera.org/learn/python-data-analysis
.. _Practical Business Python: http://pbpython.com/
.. _Pycoders Weekly: http://pycoders.com/