Paul Linkchorst

I agree with you. Python’s major advantage is its breadth. For example, R can run Machine Learning algorithms on a preprocessed dataset, but Python is much better at processing the data. Pandas is an incredibly useful library that can essentially do everything SQL does and more. matplotlib lets you create useful visualizations to quickly understand your data. In terms of algorithm availability, you can get plenty of algorithms out of the box with scikit-learn.
The choice of programming language depends on your work and goal of your data analysis. At present the two most popular programming tools are R and Python. Python is used when data analysis tasks need to be integrated with web apps and code needs to be incorporated into a production database. Python is the most important programming language for data science and data mining because it is easy to learn, scalable with awesome visualization packages and excellent python community where you can find data science libraries.

Python vs R, a general question for many beginners, but choosing the tools should never be the primary problem, what you want to handle with by using such a tool should be your first consideration. As you stated, you want to build your ability to code, I would also suggest Python. Python, being a more general-purpose language, is great for handling the myriad tasks you’ll have to do when coding other than mathematics, that’s one of its advantage against R. And even in the context of data analysis work, these certainly pop up. Need to parse data in a funny format? Want to represent your data with custom classes that can’t easily be shoehorned into an array structure? Python might be preferable.

My first programming language was C programming back when I was 16 years old. I strongly agree with the choice being Python. From what I have noticed is that coding in Python is relatively easier than other languages.

And, I am not sure if people are aware of this or not but we get a free Lynda.com subscription as temple students that we can access through TU PORTAL. I have tried websites like Code Academy and Udacity in the past; thought they were great; they are also free.

Thanks for sharing this, Paul ! Despite watching the video, I still think it’s unbelievable that the Redteam Security guys were able to gain access into the premises and network with so much ease. Even in their first attempt where they tried social engineering, they were almost about to gain entry into the office just pretending to be from the ISP. I recall the class when Mike Green told us that people don’t tend to question uniform and that’s exactly what happened. Doors not being locked, and surveillance systems having blind spots without any compensatory controls are really surprising too.