DataCamp Review [2020] | from a Data Scientist

hi I'm Jen I've been testing data camp over the past several months to give you a comprehensive data camp review is 2020 the year that you should sign up for data camp we'll look at the curriculum they use including which languages are covered as well as the learning style that they employ I'll go through all of the details of how data camp works and what you'll get out of using it then based on my 15 years of data science experience I'll give you my recommendation on whether data camp is worth using or whether you should go with another option Before we jump into the details of this review I want to make it clear that this video is in no way sponsored by data camp I've spent my own money to purchase a subscription to data camp to give you a full review of how it works I am including an affiliate link in the description because as I'll describe throughout this video I do like and use data camp myself using that affiliate link helps me produce more videos like this without any additional cost to you now let's get into the review data camp is an online learning platform to teach you data science and programming their main message and advertising focuses around learning data science so while programming is a big part of that they're not looking to teach people programming skills that aren't interested in data science I think you could still use it for that but it's really not the area that data campus targeted towards data camps curriculum data camp is structured around the hundreds of different courses as well as projects and different assessments that you can take well you can take all of these courses in any order you pick and you could skip around from area to area to learn specific types of skills this central focus of their curriculum structure is around skill tracks and career tracks so skill tracks focus on a combination of trainings that prepare you to execute a specific skill whereas as career tracks they prepare you more in a larger way to enter a specific career field there are 14 different career tracks and 43 different skills tracks career tracks focus on learning a programming language as well as the other data science skills that you need to prepare you for a specific career so examples of some of their career tracks include data scientists with R and data scientists with Python so that's something that you'll notice in the career tracks is there's 14 options but some of them are really specific to just which programming language that you're going to use as part of that career track and what you want to focus on both the career tracks and the skills tracks are built on different sets of those hundreds of courses that they have to offer career tracks are going to be more in depth they're gonna take longer there's going to be more courses because you're focused on everything that you would need for that particular career skills tracks on the other hand while there are multiple courses long tend to be a lot shorter because they're focused on a very specific skill often a skill that's also taught within a career track data camp provides estimates of how long every course career track and skill track will take you to complete of course the courses are going to be the shortest skill tracks the next end length and the career tracks are going to be the longest while they offer a career track option for programmer keep in mind as I said at the beginning of the video that they're really focused around data science so if your real goal is to become a programmer I think there's better options out there for you than what data camp has to offer let's look at the data camp programming language options since data camp is centered around data science and not just learning a language they're focused on the three main languages that are being used for data science that is sequel Python and our they offer courses in some other areas like intro to tableau courses for instance but the key focus is around these three languages and learn how to use them program them and manipulate data within those I mentioned there are a few hundred different data camp courses as of the filming of this video there's three hundred and twenty seven different courses the majority of those are around Python R and sequel since that's what their career and skills tracks mainly focus on however they do offer some training in most cases around four to six hours long and other things so I mentioned tableau they also offer introductory training to get and shell as well as a few other options you can easily see on their site what they have to offer in addition to training data camp also gives you the option to take assessments these assessments are pretty quick I think they estimate about 10 minutes apiece to take them and they adapt as you take them they're really there to give you an idea of where your skill level is and where you should focus so if you start out with some really beginner type questions on Python then if you answer them correctly they're going to get progressively harder if they're wrong they'll give you other easy questions to gauge where on the spectrum of skill that you are and then based on that they'll point you in the right direction for what courses or focus areas that you might want to spend more time in data camp also offers projects once you've had some time to learn and build your skills you have the option to start doing different projects that are data science related this is really your chance to put into practice everything that you've just learned each project is centered around one or more specific topic or skill areas so you can sort and find projects by things like data manipulation data visualization or maybe you want to do a case study most of the projects are very heavily guided this is great if you're just starting to put these skills into practice you've got someone there helping you along the way that can guide you if things go wrong or if you need a little bit of extra help I think that's a great way to practice when you're first getting started one of my big issues with data camp though is this project area once you have more experience you really need to be working on projects where someone's not telling you do steps 1 2 3 4 5 etc because the reality of working in data science or data analytics is you're not going to have someone telling you every time here's the exact set of steps to do I also recognized though that it would be very difficult to put together a system that leaves it very open-ended but also provides the type of support that you'd need along the way so I think data camp projects are a great way to get started with learning yet but I'd encourage you to spend some time outside of the data camp projects working with data working with case studies and visualizations to get more of a feel of what reality is gonna be when you're using these skills at work or in everyday life however you're going to use these going forward now that we've talked some about the structure of data count let's look at their learning style this is one of the main differences when you look at different platforms a lot of them have a lot of overlap in the languages that they teach and the skills that they teach but the learning styles tend to differ sometimes lately and sometimes quite heavily data camp has a very modern feel to it which makes sense since it's teaching you data science and you're working on programming languages the way it's structured is within each course you have several different modules or sections to it at the beginning of each section you have a short video they generally seem to be a few minutes long based on all of the ones that I've tried out then once you have that introductory video which is someone explaining to you the type of concepts you're going to be learning and a little bit about why they're important you head into the practice section the way a data canvas structured is you typically have instructions and an example on the left-hand side of your screen and then on the right you have the environment where you can practice what they're teaching you so with on that left-hand side you get a short written introduction an example case of when you might use the skill and then the exercise beneath it that it wants you to complete has you practiced this skill sometimes it's exactly the same thing that they've shown in the example you just have to change the words a little bit in other cases it's a little bit different it builds on it a little bit more in any of these cases once you start working on it you have the option that you can run your code and submit your answer to get it checked you also if you're struggling a little bit with it can get hints this gives you immediate feedback on whether you're doing things correctly and if there's anything you need to change I found this to be pretty instantaneous I didn't have any lag between submitting my answer and immediately finding out whether it was right or wrong even if it tells you it's wrong you still have the option to try again or you can take a hint data camp is trying to focus on a little bit of gamification to make this a more fun to do so you get experience points for everything you get correct any tent that you take takes away experience points that you might gain from finishing that overall section of the course or that specific exercise that you're working on I did notice that even while they were teaching different concepts if there were multiple ways to do something data camp would accept any answer I'm a little torn on this because I think that's really good that they encouraged that there are multiple right ways to do things often when you're coding however I noticed on some of the more introductory sections when they were talking about ways to code that would make your code more efficient you could still put in the less efficient answer in that specific exercise that's focused on efficiency and you would still get a get back a response that you answered it correctly so for instance in if you wanted to take a number and raise it to a power the long way to do that would be to multiply that number out multiple times the short way would be to use the the code that you need to to raise it to the power directly it will accept either answer as correct which is technically true but I think if you're just learning things there's a little bit of a risk that you focus so much on the long way and don't learn the shortcuts so the easy way around that is focus on whatever they're teaching you in the exercise if they're teaching you a quicker more elegant way to do something do that don't just do the long way it's better to take a few extra minutes to learn things right up front than it is to fly through get all the exercises right but then when you come to actually using this in practice you're always writing much longer code than you need to I feel like this is a minor beef again it is technically correct it's just something to be aware of as you're working through and I'm not sure that there's any system that doesn't allow you to do this so just something to keep in mind Deana camps learning style is great if you're a person that likes to know a little bit about what to do and the jump in and just practice and figure it out they give you a little bit of theory upfront but they're not giving you a whole lot of theory upfront they're really introducing the concept and then immediately having you go practice it and by practicing it you in at least in concept will pick up some of the theory I think for a lot of people this is fine other people I think it's helpful that they know the theory just depends on what you want out of a system you'll probably learn it equally well whether there's theory or not it really comes down to whether you want to know conceptually why you're doing things like you're doing them and understand more of the structure behind the language versus just executing on it sometimes that theory can be really helpful longer term as you're figuring out new things for yourself that you have already been taught in another system or training method along the way let's get into cost how much this data camp cost there are several different plans that are offered from data camp there's three individual options and there's two additional enterprise or business level options Dana camp offers a free option this gives you access to a few different beginner courses seven different projects and lets you start to get a feel for data camp however it's very clear once you start working with it that the free option is really just to get you hooked and help you decide whether you like their style the free option isn't enough to actually learn a usable amount of anything you can take the first lesson in every course but if you take just the first lesson in an introduction to Python course and then you move into a first lesson in advanced Python you're gonna be completely lost that second lesson isn't going to help you at all so use the free one to decide whether you like it the second individual option is $25 a month and at this level you get access to a lot more courses as well as two of the 14 career tracks you also get access to all the skill assessments at this level I think this is a good step up but what I'd really recommend is the third option the third level is about eight dollars more if you get an annual subscription at the premium level you're paying thirty three twenty five a month annually and you get access to everything you get all of the several hundred courses you get all of the career tracks all of the assessments all of the projects you get heavier support from data camp and in their user community so with the minor price difference between a basic and a premium membership I really recommend just going for the Premium Membership if you're going to subscribe to data camp I also notice that if you sign up for a free subscription they usually offer you a discounted rate so the 3325 were - about $400 a year but I noticed the first week after I signed up I was given a cheaper upgrade option so I could upgrade for two hundred and fifty dollars they occasionally run other sales as well so keep an eye out for that you can get it add a little bit more of a discount even at four hundred dollars though I think it's a pretty good price for everything that you're getting and you're getting constant updates they are adding more and more courses over time so you do get more for having that annual subscription you can also sign up monthly but it doesn't get quite a bit more expensive if you go month to month instead let's talk about support and community because this can be something that may be important to you as you're learning these new skills anyone on a paid plan has access to a slack community where they can talk with others including moderators of the forum if you have questions on the exercises or really on anything related to the data camp content at the premium level you also get access to priority support from data cans themselves and again at the price difference I would just go for premium if you're gonna spend the money at all we've talked about a lot of different things related to data kam let's now boil it down to the pros and the cons of using data kam in the Pro column data camp is a great option if you want to immerse yourself in doing the work doing the practice and you don't care a lot about theory they're cost effective option for building the skills that you need to get into data science and data analytics or to strengthen your knowledge in those areas they're also quite a large platform and continue to grow pretty quickly so I'm expecting that we'll continue to see additional courses and probably even additional skills and career tracks added over time now the cons think the means you're coming when it comes to data camp is that the amount of information they give you related to data science outside of programming it's pretty minimal this is an important area that a lot of people tend to overlook there is a lot math that needs to be understood to really be good at data science it's one thing to know a language or know an analytics tool but if you don't know exactly what you need to do in it it doesn't really matter if you know how to do or write anything in the language so this is the main shortcoming I think this is easily supplemented by taking a few classes are doing some work in other areas outside of data camp and it's not a reason to prevent you from joining data camp and using their services I mainly mention it as a con because their specific focus is around data science so if they're going to market themselves as being a comprehensive solution for that I'd expect that they are completely comprehensive and I find that that tends to be a little bit lacking even though they do have some courses related to other areas some analysis skills that you'll need outside of the programming languages now to my overall recommendation I highly recommend data cam I think they're a great price that lets you build a lot of skills and the way they teach feels very intuitive I've used it myself to learn skills in languages that I'm not as familiar with or work on things that I just don't find myself using day to day but are skills that I don't want to lose even though I'm not using them every single day in my current job I like that there's a lot of flexibility you have a lot of different options you can learn skills in different areas concurrently or you can go in a more linear fashion down a career or a skill track as opposed to a lot of free or less structured options I like that you get immediate feedback on what you're doing so you know where you need to correct change and improve and if you're struggling it's easy to get hints within the exercises or to get additional support if you need it beyond what those hints are giving you if you're really struggling to get a concept you have a built in resource to help you understand it better so you can move on to the next skill that you need to work on use the link in the description to sign up for data camp for yourself and see you like it thanks for watching today's video please consider subscribing and turning on notifications if you haven't already I'll see you in the next video you

Channel: The Career Force

Views: 45,505

Rating: 4.9189873 out of 5

Keywords: DataCamp Review 2020, DataCamp, Data bootcamp, coding bootcamp, data science, data analytics, python programming, tableau training, the career force, learn data science, learn data analytics, programming, r programming, datacamp vs dataquest, data science for beginners

Id: 7itLZQ_yjNE

Length: 20min 21sec (1221 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 07 2020