Quickstart
Course Structure and Setup
Welcome to the Brillian DMA Course
Congratulations on taking your first step towards becoming a brilliant data and analytics professional.
Pre-requisites
Estimated time: None to 30 minutes
Before you get started, make sure you have the following installed on your machine with the right privileges. If your machine is issued by your company, you may have to ask your IT department to grant you the necessary permissions and firewall access.
- Install Python 3.7 or higher
- Install Git
- Install a code editor (I recommend Visual Studio Code, or VSCode for short)
- Install Tableau Public
The Python courses will be taught using Python 3.7 or higher. For the most part, if you’re using a version of Python that’s slightly older, you should be fine.
Tooling and Setup
Estimated time: 45 minutes
Python programming environment
To test that you have set up everything correctly, complete the following steps:
Estimated time: 1 Hour
Pull external data into Python
- Use a command prompt or your Terminal to launch your command line interface, then
pip install requests
to install the Requests library. - Type
python
orpython3
to launch the Python interpreter. - Run the following code snippet to pull external data into Python:
Use Pandas and Matplotlib
pandas
is a powerful data manipulation library that allows you to work with structured data in Python.matplotlib
is a plotting library that enables you to create visualizations from your data. We’ll be using these libraries extensively throughout the Python data analysis courses.
Install these two libraries by running pip install pandas matplotlib
in your terminal.
Then, run the following code snippet to visualize the data you pulled in the previous step:
Practice your skills directly
Estimated time: 30 Mins
You really only get better at programming by, well, programming. So, we’ve set up a series of exercises that you can work through to practice your skills.