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Are you an aspiring data scientist or early in your data science career? If so, you know that you should use your programming, statistics, and machine learning skills—coupled with domain expertise—to use data to answer business questions.
To succeed as a data scientist, therefore, becoming proficient in coding is essential. Especially for handling and analyzing large datasets, building and deploying machine learning models, and more.
This article outlines seven actionable steps to help you master coding for data science, whether you’re a beginner or looking to level up your skills.
Step 1: Learn Python (or R) and SQL
When starting your journey in data science, the first step is to become proficient in a programming language.
We recommend choosing Python. But if you want to focus only on data and statistical analysis, you can choose R as well.
What You Should Focus On
When learning Python, focus on:
- Variables and data types: Understand the basic building blocks of programming, such as integers, strings, floats, and booleans.
- Control flow: Learn how to control the execution of code using loops, conditional statements), and functions.
- Functions and error handling: Master the art of writing reusable code by creating functions and gracefully handling errors using `try-except` blocks.
- OOP: Try to become familiar with object-oriented programming in Python.
And on the SQL front, work on:
- Basic queries: Learn how to retrieve data using SELECT, filter with WHERE, and sort data with ORDER BY.
- Joins and aggregations: Master how to combine data from multiple tables using joins and perform aggregate calculations using common functions like SUM(), AVG(), and COUNT().
Once you’ve learned Python (or R) for data manipulation and SQL for database management, you’ll be able to handle both in-memory datasets and data stored in databases. This is important before you can go any further.
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Step 2: Get Comfortable with Data Manipulation
Data manipulation is one of the most critical skills in data science. Before you can analyze or model data, you must clean and transform it into a usable format. In Python, the pandas library is the go-to tool for this. While R has powerful libraries like dplyr for similar tasks.
Understanding data manipulation techniques allows you to quickly prepare data for analysis and is foundational for building models.
What You Should Focus On
- Filtering data: Learn how to select subsets of data based on conditions.
- Grouping and aggregating: Get comfortable summarizing data using functions like groupby() and aggregate functions in pandas.
- Merging and reshaping: Learn how to merge multiple datasets and reshape data (using pivot tables) to meet your analysis needs.
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Step 3: Learn Data Visualization
Effective data visualization allows you to understand your data better and uncover patterns and relationships that are not immediately apparent in raw data.
Data visualization is important both for exploratory data analysis (EDA) and presenting findings to stakeholders.
You should learn to work with Python libraries like Matplotlib, Seaborn, and Plotly. Or ggplot2 if you prefer R.
What You Should Focus On
- Basic plots: Understand how to create line plots, bar charts, scatter plots, and histograms to visualize your data.
- More advanced plots: Learn how to visualize distributions, correlations (using heatmaps), and time series data.
- Interactive visualizations: Learn to use tools like Plotly to create interactive dashboards and graphs—useful for presentations and reports.
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Step 4: Learn Machine Learning Algorithms
Once you have a good understanding of data analysis and visualization, as outlined in the previous steps, the next logical step is to learn about ML algorithms.
Scikit-learn is a powerful and easy-to-use library for this purpose.
What You Should Focus On
You should focus on the following algorithms, the assumptions they rely on, use cases,a nd limitations:
- Linear regression
- Logistic regression
- Decision Trees and Random Forests
- Clustering
- Gradient Boosting
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Step 5: Learn Containerization and API Development
As you move forward in your data science journey, it’s important to understand how to deploy your models and share your work.
Containerization tools like Docker allow you to package your code and dependencies in a consistent environment, while APIs help expose your models to others through web services. These skills are essential for making your data science projects more portable and scalable.
What You Should Focus On
- Containerization tools: Containerization ensures that your applications run consistently across systems—eliminating the “works on my machine” problem. Learn how to use containerization tools like Docker to package your applications.
- Docker basics: Start by familiarizing yourself with creating a Dockerfile, building images, and running containers. Learn how to use volumes and networking features to persist data and communicate between services.
- Best practices: Ensure you’re building small, efficient containers and are familiar with managing dependencies and security concerns.
- API development with Flask or FastAPI: Build lightweight REST APIs that allow users or systems to interact with your data science models.
- Flask: Start with the basics of setting up a simple API endpoint, then move on to more complex features such as handling POST requests, authentication, and model serving.
- FastAPI: Learn to build asynchronous APIs for faster, more efficient applications.
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Step 6: Practice Working with Large Datasets
Data science often involves handling data that exceeds the memory capacity of your local machine. Learning how to work with large datasets efficiently is important to scale your analysis and models.
Tools like Dask and PySpark in Python allow for parallelized data processing. They allow you to work with real-world datasets that are often too large to fit in memory.
What You Should Focus On
- Data partitioning: Learn to split your dataset into smaller, manageable chunks and process them.
- Distributed computing: Use frameworks like `Dask` or `PySpark` to process large datasets in parallel across multiple machines.
- Further your SQL skills: Become proficient in SQL and Spark SQL for querying large databases efficiently and retrieving only the data you need.
Resources
Step 7: Build Projects and Collaborate
The most important step in mastering coding for data science is to apply everything you’ve learned through hands-on projects.
Building real-world projects not only reinforces your skills but also demonstrates your expertise to potential employers. And your portfolio will speak of your experience and expertise.
Collaborating with other learners and experienced professionals and contributing to open-source projects can further your coding skills.
What You Should Focus On
- Start with simple data wrangling tasks and move to more complex problems that require more sophisticated solutions.
- Participate in Kaggle contests and other competitions by data science communities to solve real-world problems.
- Contribute to open-source data science projects on GitHub to improve your coding and collaboration skills.
Building and sharing projects helps you gain practical experience, solidify your skills, and create a portfolio that showcases your work.
Wrapping Up
Learning coding for data science involves gaining a solid foundation in programming, a good understanding of data analysis and visualization, and building machine learning models.
Additionally, containerization and API development are essential skills to help you deploy and scale models.
If you’re interested in learning math for data science, read 7 Steps to Mastering Math for Data Science.
Bala Priya C is a developer and technical writer from India. She likes working at the intersection of math, programming, data science, and content creation. Her areas of interest and expertise include DevOps, data science, and natural language processing. She enjoys reading, writing, coding, and coffee! Currently, she’s working on learning and sharing her knowledge with the developer community by authoring tutorials, how-to guides, opinion pieces, and more. Bala also creates engaging resource overviews and coding tutorials.
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