I love self-learning. I’ve always said, “if you can Google it, why pay for it?” In that spirit, I bring you my favorite 10 free learning resources that you can find on the internet. I’ll keep posting many more such lists and they’ll reflect my current obsessions. As of now, I’m heavily into AI, machine learning, and deep learning. So forgive me if there is an excess of material related to those subjects. Let’s dive right into it then, starting from -
Towards Data Science - I’ve found it to be a great source of articles on data science, machine learning, and programming in general. You get to learn quick and dirty techniques to accomplish most common machine learning tasks and tutorials on the basic concepts here. Sometimes it gets a bit dry but useful nonetheless.
Hackernoon - This website hosts amazing articles on not only the principles and application of machine learning and cryptocurrencies but also in-depth opinion pieces about these and many other technologies. The articles are a bit on the longer side but quite enriching intellectually.
University of Reddit - This one used to be hosted by Reddit but they’ve removed support recently. However, I find it much more useful than it’s new replacement - r/UniversityOfReddit. You’ll find everything from “The art of shaving” to “Language tutorials” to “Programming courses” in this wacky little corner of the internet.
Learning Python The Hard Way - Be careful. There are two versions of it available. One for Python 2 and the other for Python 3. Choose according to the version you want to learn. Written by Zed. A. Shaw, this book is written in the style of a strict and no-nonsense teacher. It doesn’t wait around and gets down to brass tacks from page one. Moreover, Mr. Shaw teaches Python using command prompt. His slogan is - “The hard way is easier”.
Better Explained - This cute little site is devoted to simplifying the gnarliest concepts in a simple and fun way. It mostly covers maths and computer science concepts and isn’t very comprehensive but it’s growing and helped me a lot.
Google AI - This website is full of articles, tutorials and use cases of the cutting edge AI research. My favorite part of this site is Google AI Education. This is the part where Google engineers put up curated courses for beginners, intermediate and advanced learners in the format of your choosing.
Coursera - Coursera is one of the best MOOC sites out there. Ranging from arts to sciences to social sciences this site has it all. But my favorite part is the CEO Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning Course and his Deep Learning Specialization Course. The courses are free but if you want the certification you’ll have to pay a monthly fee. Whichever way you cut it, this is one of the most comprehensive AI courses out there.
Deep Learning Book - If you are like me you probably like to read more than watch videos. Sure, it takes more time but you also gain a deeper understanding. That’s why I sought out the “Deep Learning Book”. Don’t worry, it’s available for free in its entirety. Written by Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville this is one of the best treatments of this subject from the basics to the cutting edge.
Kaggle - If you like to learn by doing you will find this place absolutely delightful. Kaggle has an abundance of datasets you can use to train your machine learning models. Many competitions and many guides to help you through the bumps on your journey. If you’re serious about machine learning, Kaggle will nitro boost your growth. My favorite is the Titanic Survival Prediction Problem here. You use real data from Titanic travelers’ ticket stubs to predict who would survive the disaster. You test your model’s accuracy by comparing it with real historical Titanic survivor’s data.
Stephen Wolfram’s Blog - I had the most trouble writing this part of the article. There is nothing about Stephen Wolfram that is not fascinating and not immediately usable in real life by any engineer all over the world. He’s an accomplished mathematician, physicist and computer scientist. He runs the famous app/website Wolfram Alpha (btw get it on your phone or your browser NOW). He invented the programming language Wolfram Mathematica (btw if you are interested in NLP, consider learning Mathematica). In fact, just go to his website and spend a day or two just clicking through the links and blowing your own mind! Don’t forget to read his book A New Kind Of Science.
So this is my list for today. But this isn’t the last of it. As I keep surfing the net for more engineering answers and even more engineering questions, I’ll keep bombarding you with many more such lists.
Piyush Tainguriya
An engineer by education, writer by profession and a stand-up comic by vocation. I'm only half joking though.
January 25, 2018
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