Coursera Statistics, Making Sense of Data: A applied Statistics course that teaches the complete pipeline of statistical analysis MIT: Statistical Thinking and Data Analysis: Introduction to probability, sampling, regression, common distributions, and inference. While R is the de facto standard for performing statistical analysis, it has quite a high learning curve and there are other areas of data science for which it is not well suited. To avoid learning a new language for a specific problem domain, we recommend trying to perform the exercises of these courses with Python and its numerous statistical libraries. You will find that much of the functionality of R can be replicated with NumPy, @SciPy, @Matplotlib, and @Python Data Analysis Library Books Well-written books can be a great reference (and supplement) to these courses, and also provide a more independent learning experience. These may be useful if you already have some knowledge of the subject or just need to fill in some gaps in your understanding: O'Reilly Think Stats: An Introduction to Probability and Statistics for Python programmers Introduction to Probability: Textbook for Berkeley's Stats 134 class, an introductory treatment of probability with complementary exercises.

Zipfian Academy has graduated more than 50 alumni, placing graduates into data science roles at Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Tesla, Uber, Square, Coursera, and many more Silicon Valley companies. Participants in our program come from backgrounds in engineering, data analysis, statistics, and occasionally professional poker. Here, we share an interview with Alex Mentch, a graduate from our Winter 2014 Cohort. Alex hails originally from Idaho, and studied electrical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Looking for a career transition into data science, Alex attended our Winter 2014 cohort where he built a search engine for state legislation.