THE ECSTATIC START; ONE MONTH GONE, TWO GREAT ONES ON THE WAY.
The excitement of being among the selected mentees was still the major thrill to kick-off the program at She Code Africa. The core foundation of data science was learnt this month, coupled with intense activities to practice what was learnt.
STRUCTURED QUERY LANGUAGE (SQL).
The learning path of this topic was quite explicit, starting off with the basic introduction of what SQL entails and why it is necessary for our journey in data science. SQL is an essential tool for data analysis and also applicable in any field or sphere of life, which can range from operations, finance etc.
The learning path started with learning how to write the structured query language to interact with database, which was consequently followed by other subtopics enumerated below.
A. SQL BASICS
B. SQL JOINS
C. SQL AGGREGATIONS
D. SQL SUB-QUERIES AND TEMPORARY TABLES
E. SQL DATA CLEANING
F. SQL WINDOW FUNCTIONS.
DATA VISUALIZATION
After the great journey of interacting with our data set using SQL, data visualization is a great tool that was learnt in getting insights from our data sets. This followed a very interesting sequence of;
A. Introduction to data visualization used for univariate and bivariate analysis, the use of visualization in comparing variables.
B. Design: This gives the distinction between explanatory and exploratory analysis.
C. Visual encoding: This explains what makes a bad and good visual, chart junks, dark ink ratio, the use of colours, shapes, sizes and design integrity.
D. The use of Tableau: The creation of visualizations on tableau, making dashboards and stories.
PYTHON
A very important tool in data analysis, a few take-away to note while exploring the python programming language is python being case sensitive, importance of spacing and the ability to learn through error messages. The basic building blocks that was learnt were;
A. Data types; integers, floats, bools, strings are some of the data types we have in python.
B. Operators: we have arithmetic operators which includes +, -, /, **, //, *, %, ^ (caret operation known as bitwise XOR).
Comparison operators; <, >, <=, >=, !=.
Logical operators; AND, OR, NOT
C. Data structures:
Types of data structures includes; List, Tuples, Set, Dictionaries, compound data structures.
Built-in functions or methods.
D. Control flows; conditional statements, Boolean expressions, For and While loops, Break and Continue, Zip and Enumerate, list comprehensions.
E.Functions; Defining functions, variable scope, documentation, lambda expressions, iterators and generators.
Wrapping up month one was exciting and filled with knowledge, one of the major lessons learnt was consistency and practice. There is definitely more to learn but in the meantime let’s bask in the euphoria of the successes made.
