Microsoft has released two Python video courses to help AI developers get started in what could be a very lucrative career.
The new video courses assume the developer already has a basic standard of Python skills. If you don’t, I’m afraid you’ll need to brush up on those first. Fortunately, Microsoft released a 44-part “Python for Beginners” series last autumn (or “fall” for our American friends.)
For those with the Python skills, or if you’ve just consumed all 44-parts of Microsoft’s course in record time, the new courses are around three hours each.
The first course, More Python for Beginners, features 20 videos and covers areas such as lambdas, inheritance, and asynchronous operations.
The second course, Even More Python for Beginners: Data Tools, consists of 31 videos and really dives into using Python for machine learning and data science. Students are taught how to use popular Python libraries for the aforementioned topics; along with using the Jupyter Notebooks browser-based development environment.
Each of the courses are still led by Christopher Harrison, senior program manager at Microsoft, and Susan Ibach, business development manager from Microsoft AI Gaming.
“While we’re not going to get into conversations about choosing algorithms or building models, we are going to introduce what you’ll use when you begin the journey. We’ll highlight Jupyter Notebooks, the favorite tool of data scientists,” Harrison and Ibach wrote in a blog.
As of writing, the first part in Microsoft’s Python course series has been viewed over 1.75 million times.
The course’s popularity is of little surprise given the huge interest in Python as AI talent becomes more in-demand; with six-figure salaries not unheard of. In last year’s GitHub Octoverse report, Python overtook Java to become the second most popular language on the world’s largest repository host.
