Course Review — Move from Excel to Python with Pandas by Chris Moffitt from Practical Business Python

I bought this course from Chris yesterday.

https://training.talkpython.fm/courses/move-from-excel-to-python-and-pandas

Though I was generally feeling negative about buying more courses/books on Pandas, I bought this course because I happen to read this wonderful article Pandas Datatypes on Chris’s blog. I was so impressed with the comprehensive coverage and the thoughtful step-by-step presentation of ideas in that single blog post that I decided to purchase his course. People like Chris should be supported and encouraged. There is so much material on Pandas, but most of them are jargon-heavy, not organized well, or is just regurgitation of the pandas documentation. But Chris’s blog was quite different.

Now, here is my honest feedback: Though I did not learn a lot of new stuff from this course, I still appreciate the course. I loved the end-of-chapter visual summaries that Chris has put together. Here is an example:

If you are new to Pandas, or even totally new to programming, this can be a great course to be gently introduced to the wonderful world of data analysis with Pandas. Chris takes typical Excel tasks and then shows how they can be done in Pandas. The examples he has chosen were simple and easy to understand.

I got started with Pandas with this wonderful and comprehensive video:
Brandon Rhodes — Pandas From The Ground Up — PyCon 2015 — YouTube

But if I have to recommend a course for anyone to get started on Pandas now, I would recommend this course. If you are totally new to Programming and want to move from Excel to Pandas, this is a great option.

Thanks Chris for this course and more importantly for your wonderful blog — this review is my way of saying thank you for the time and effort you have put in putting together your blog.

Update after 1 week:

I just wanted to reflect on how doing this course has changed me in this last 1 week after the course.

I keep using the “Restart and Run cells” options a lot more this week which I have learnt from Chris. This it is a simple thing in Jupyter, it is time-saving when I want to quickly rerun everything in the notebook as I am about to change something in the notebook.

My understanding of the aggregations has improved quite a lot after doing the course. For example, here is something I wrote yesterday which I attribute directly to Chris’s course.

I was checking Data Quality on a sample dataset in Chris’s course and here I am able to see that a single invoice had more than 1 customer. I could see not just the count, but also the names in a list, which is cool.

But I still do not understand groupby and all its power fully. There are a few tasks that I want to do with groupby that I don’t know how to do…So, I still have to learn more…