Love the machine learning courses on Udacity. They are challenging and give me confidence that I can do it.
Overall Satisfaction with Udacity
Currently, I am the only one in Udacity in my company, although I encouraged another one of my colleagues to take some classes also and I believe he will. I am studying Machine Learning, AI and Python. I have completed 1 nano degree and found it both challenging and fun. The courses are put together very well and I have been able to go through the training and complete the assignments without needing help from the mentors or instructors. They just put together a very good curriculum. I am in my second course, Machine Learning in Natural Language Processing. Just finished building my first part of speech tagger and I am moving on to the optional project on building a simple question and answer system using IBM Watson's NLP services. I love the courses and what I am learning. They give me great confidence that I can code my own machine learning models.
Pros
- The online courses are very well done and cover the topics so you truly understand them and can have confidence working on the projects.
- Their projects to validate what I learn are very challenging. I spend days on them, but in the end, they come out nice so there is a great feeling when you know you have accomplished something difficult
- They have great responsive mentors. I have asked a few questions here and there when I get stuck and they respond quickly, it just always works out for me after I ask the question I go back to try it again and I figure it out. Still, I follow the chats and they provide a lot of good help to students.
Cons
- When building neural networks and working with the data you have to manipulate the data or convert it into numerical forms in dictionaries, lists, numpy arrays, etc. Some of these data structures can be fairly complex. My only suggestion would be if they could provide a sample of perhaps what the head of the data file might look like as that would make it easier for me to figure out what I need to code to get to the goal. Some of the nested dictionaries in Python, which look like JSON files to me, are sometimes not as easy to visualize just from a written statement of the task to do.
- I would also say more references to other reading materials related to what we are learning would be great. I search for a lot of them on my own, but I am never sure if I am reading the good stuff or not. Recommendations would be great.
- I am already in a great position as a CTO with a great company. I hope to be able to build some new technology with what I am learning, but I haven't applied any of it yet to my own real-world problems. I will though.
I have taken courses on Udemy and Pluralsight also. Good systems, but I just like Udacity better. They challenge me more in figuring out how to code something instead of just showing me how someone would code something. I learn better that way.
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