 What is going on everybody? My name is Alex Friedberg and today we're gonna be talking the best online courses for data analysts. I'd like to say that I'm a self-taught data analyst because I really taught myself from scratch with YouTube and websites and eventually courses like the ones that we're gonna look at today. All the courses that we're gonna look at today are ones that I have actually taken and now that I am a data analyst, I look back on these courses when I was just starting out and learning and realize how helpful these courses actually were. And so I hope that I can give you some courses and some recommendations of the courses that I took that I loved and that you guys can take as well to become a data analyst faster. Now the first place that we're gonna be looking at today is Udemy. I absolutely love Udemy. I really think it's the first place right above self-learning through YouTube and websites. It's kind of the cheapest option of all the online courses that you can take but they have absolutely amazing courses and you can just buy them individually so they can be like 10 bucks each and $10 for 20 hours worth of a course is an absolute steal. And so I think Udemy is a wonderful place to start especially if you don't wanna invest a lot of time and money but you wanna have something that will help you in your career. The very first course on Udemy that I recommend is this Learning Python for Data Analysis and Visualization course. This is by Jose Portilla. He is an amazing, amazing teacher. I have taken several of his courses and I highly recommend just about every single one that I've taken with his. So this course specifically goes over a lot of really good and useful things that data analysts should really know. Some of the things that you're gonna learn in this course are things like NumPy and Pandas. I am always stressing how important Pandas is to learn if you're gonna use Python for Data Analysis. It's super useful. So you're gonna learn all the data frames and everything like that. You'll also learn things about data visualization and then you'll get a project that you actually work all the way through from start to finish. And to me, that is the best way to learn is actually doing a project from start to finish but it's hard to come up with projects on your own. So having a project like this that you can work through and that has already been laid out for you is really, really useful. Another thing that I think is really, really great in this course is the machine learning. Now I don't personally use machine learning at all in my job but I work with a lot of people who do. And so understanding the jargon, understanding how they use it is really important. And also I learned a lot of super useful stuff about regression analysis and linear regression, logistical regression and tons of other things. So I really, really think that this is important to know even if you're not gonna use it in your job. The next course that I recommend is the statistics for day science and business analysis. I do not come from a statistics background at all. So when I was actually starting to become a data analyst I didn't know anything about what I needed to learn. So this course was really, really useful and I remember a lot of the things that I learned from this course. Some of the things that you're gonna learn in this course are things like distributions and confidence intervals, things that I had never heard of before I actually took this course. And then at the bottom of course you're gonna go through some testing and some examples and you're gonna actually go through some projects which are again super, super useful if you're trying to actually learn this stuff to apply it. So if you're asking me how much math or stats do you need to know in order to become a data analyst, I think that this is an amazing place to start and honestly if you learn everything in this course you really should be set for a data analyst position. The next course that I recommend is this SQL course right here. When I started my first real data analyst job I had been learning my SQL up until then but when I got my first job I learned that they use SQL server and I didn't know anything about it nor did I know T-SQL or even what that was. And so this course taught me everything I needed to know and I studied it nonstop for the first two weeks on my new job and I used absolutely everything that I learned in this course in my actual job. So this course really, really saved me. Some of the things that you're gonna learn are things like the absolute basics like the select, the from, the where all the way up to learning CTEs and sub-queries even to creating constraints, views and triggers. These are all super important things that I use every single day and he does an amazing job at going through every single one of these things. The very last course that I recommend you to me is this course right here which is natural language processing with Python and I know that NLP is typically associated with data scientists but it is so, so useful for you to understand it now especially if you're working with any type of unstructured data. Some of the things that you'll learn in this course are things like how to extract your unstructured data how to actually parse it out how to use regular expression word to VEC and categorize your data and then actually using that data for analysis. I actually did an entire NLP project from this course when I was extracting data from Twitter and then I was breaking it apart and categorizing it and then I built plots and graphs based off of the data and I thought it was just super interesting and I learned so much about Python and about NLP and about how that whole process actually works. Next we're gonna be looking at Coursera and I really like Coursera I feel like that's the next step above Udemy and it has a monthly subscriptions you can subscribe and have access to any course that you want to do as many courses as you'd like and when I was in the thick of it doing six or seven courses per month I was actually saving money doing Coursera because it was only I think $40 per month whereas Udemy is just paid per course and so if I had done that on Udemy I would have paid maybe $70 or $80 instead of the $40 that I was spending on Coursera. So if you're gonna do a lot of courses like I did I recommend Coursera because you can do as many as you want but if you're just starting out and you're gonna do maybe one or two courses a month I recommend Udemy. So the first course that I recommend on Coursera is Databases and SQL for Data Science. It's gonna take you through the absolute basics of actually creating your table and creating your table to the more advanced things and along the way you're gonna have reading assignments and you're gonna have quizzes where you can actually make sure that you know that information and if not it points you back to where you need to look in order to learn that information which is really useful. Something else that you're gonna learn in this course is how to access your database with Python and that's super useful if you're gonna actually use Python in your job and then at the very end they have course assignments and typically these are like small projects so if you're somebody who's looking for some type of personal project to do these types of courses typically have some type of personal project and you can put that in your portfolio or in your resume or in some type of website. The next course that I recommend is Data Analysis with Python and this one is really good for beginners because it takes you from the absolute basics to the completed project and it actually has a whole project at the end. Let's look at the syllabus really quick to see some of the things that you're gonna be doing. So real quick, everything that you're gonna be learning in this is how to import data sets, how to do data wrangling, exploratory data analysis, learning how to do models, model evaluation and then at the end you'll be doing a final assignment and again if you're trying to build a portfolio these are really great ideas or starter projects to use in your portfolio or on your website or on your resume and if you like putting badges on LinkedIn or something like that you can also get an IBM digital badge or you can put that on your LinkedIn or your Facebook to share that you've done the course. The next course that I recommend is Data Analysis and Presentation Skills and this is actually a specialization and it's offered by PWC and a specialization is different than a regular course because this one offers a certificate at the end and a certificate is supposed to be a little bit nicer than the badge like in the last one but it's also gonna go a lot more in depth than a regular course does. So let's take a look at some of the things that you're gonna be learning in this one. So in this specialization it's actually five separate courses. The first one is Data Driven Decision Making, the second one is Problem Solving with Excel, the third one is Data Visualization and Advanced Excel, next one is Effective Business Presentations with PowerPoint and the last one is Data Analysis and Presentation Skills. I love this specialization so much because it taught me how to present things to a client and before I really didn't know how to do that and as a data analyst you really need to know how to present things to a client or to your bosses or your boss's bosses and understand how to present things in an easily digestible way. So I think this is a great course especially for somebody who's just starting out and wants to get better at their presentation skills. The very last course that I'm gonna recommend is Data Visualization with Tableau and up until now we've only talked about Python for Data Visualization but Tableau is a fantastic tool and so many companies use it so it's a really good skill to learn. So let's look at the course and see what kind of things that you're gonna learn. So some of the topics that you're gonna be covering are the fundamentals of visualizations, essential design principles, visual analytics and then creating dashboards and storing telling and then at the very end you're gonna have a project where you use all these skills that you've learned to actually do a final project that you can use on your portfolio or your resume and again projects are really useful to have to show your abilities and so having it all set up for you in one place is very, very helpful instead of having to go figure it out on your own and create your own project from scratch. Personally Data Visualization was one of the most difficult things for me to learn and Tableau was the first thing that I learned for Data Visualization even before Python and it was just so difficult because I never worked with that before and I never had to visualize data and so taking this course and walking through the absolute basics all the way to a big project gave me a really big confidence boost. If you liked any of these courses and you want to take them I have links in the description that you can click on to take you right to that course. Thank you guys so much for watching. I really appreciate it. I hope that you liked this video. If you did be sure to like and subscribe below and I'll see you in the next video.