5 Free Python Courses for Data Science Beginners

If you’re reading this article, you probably want to learn data science and land your first data role soon. So how do you go about learning data science?

After brushing up your basic math skills, you can start learning SQL or a programming language such as Python or R. If you learn R, you can do data and statistical analysis. But Python is more versatile and easier to learn than R.

So here is a list of beginner-friendly Python programming courses that’ll help you learn the fundamentals and start building projects. Let’s get started!

1. Python for Beginners – freeCodeCamp

The Python for Beginners course on freeCodeCamp’s YouTube channel is a full-length Python course for beginners. The course is over 4.5 hours long and will get you up and running with Python fundamentals by coding two simple games: rock, paper, scissors, and Blackjack.

The course starts by exploring the fundamentals like data types, variables, and operators. It then covers control flow, built-in functions, and data structures. The course also explores advanced concepts like decorators, object-oriented programming, and functional programming.

This course does not assume any prior programming experience with Python. But it covers enough ground to help you feel confident to start building your own projects.

Link: Python for Beginners – Full Course [Programming Tutorial]

2. Python – Kaggle

If you prefer working through bite-sized text-based lessons and running code snippets along the way, the Python course on Kaggle is for you.

Besides the basics of Python’s syntax and variables, the course covers the following topics:

• Functions
• Booleans and conditionals
• Lists
• Loops and list comprehensions
• Strings and dictionaries
• Working with external libraries

Link: Learn Python | Kaggle

3. Python Tutorial (with Mini-Projects) – freeCodeCamp

In the first course, Python for Beginners, you’d have coded two simple game projects. The Python Tutorial for Beginners (with mini-projects) is a video course with 23 chapters each focusing on a different topic.

Throughout the course, you’ll also get to work on several mini-projects. The course starts with the basics like data types and built-in data structures. But it also covers the following topics:

• Functions
• Recursion
• Scope and closures
• Command-line arguments
• Lambdas and higher-order functions
• Object-oriented programming
• Errors and exceptions
• File operations
• Virtual environments

Link: Python Tutorial for Beginners (with mini-projects)

4. Python Tutorial – W3Schools

The Python Tutorial on W3Schools has bite-sized lessons along with quick practice exercises and examples that you can run in the browser.

The W3Schools Python tutorial covers the following topics:

• Control flow
• Built-in data structures
• Classes and objects
• Inheritance polymorphism
• Working with dates, JSON, and RegEx

Besides Python fundamentals, the Python tutorial also has lessons on Python data science libraries: NumPy, pandas, and matplotlib.

Link: Python Tutorial

5. Object-Oriented Programming with Python

From one or more of the courses so far, you should be familiar with object-oriented programming (OOP) in Python and it’s time to learn more. Object Oriented Programming with Python is available for free on freeCodeCamp’s YouTube channel and is a comprehensive course to learn OOP fundamentals with Python.

This course covers the following:

• Getting started with classes
• Constructor
• Class vs static methods
• Inheritance
• Getters and setters
• OOP principles

Link: Object-Oriented Programming with Python – Full Course for Beginners

Wrapping Up

If you are a data science beginner looking to learn Python, I hope you found this list of courses helpful. Even as you’re learning Python, be sure to work on interesting projects on the side so that you get to apply what you learn and also build out your project portfolio.

So happy learning and coding!

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.