If you decide to go with a Codecademy Pro subscription, then you’ll have an even larger selection of courses. Once you’ve finished the introductory course, you’ll be able to deepen your knowledge with courses on sorting algorithms, recursion, and complex data structures, and even try out challenges to test your skills, such as creating a Pokémon simulator, creating data visualizations based on roller coasters, or censoring sensitive parts of texts. Once you’ve watched the main bulk of the course, you can try your hand at the final project (in which you sort a list of students based on their marks, with special additions for especially high scores), and if you get stuck at any point in the project, you can just watch parts of the teacher’s video on how to solve it. This course gives you a run-down on strings, variables, and a greater look at data types. It also covers everything from file manipulations and functions to loops and conditions — it’s easy, concise, and a one-stop-shop for the basic foundations of Python. This course is great for anyone who wants a glimpse at what this programming language can do. After the introductory course, you’ll go over data structures, accessing web data, accessing databases (including SQL basics), and a capstone project that puts all of this knowledge together. The exercises that come with each of the nine weeks of content are a lot more challenging, though they’re never intended to turn someone off from the course. If you’re ever stuck, you can discuss the problems with other students or even the professors on Discord and Facebook. Although the bulk of the course content is free, if you choose to buy a verified certificate for the course (for $75), you can even take the midterm and final exams as well. However, those are just some of the available teachers’ courses. In fact, there are five different Python skill paths to be found on Pluralsight, each of which offers several different courses, some of which are even interactive. These other courses cover a wide range of Python-related topics, from game development to machine learning and function programming. Starting with an introduction to programming in Python and then moving on to data visualization and writing your own functions, DataCamp has everything you need for a thorough introduction to programming in Python in just 24 hours. The subscription to DataCamp isn’t the cheapest, at $400 yearly for the Premium selection and $300 per year for the Standard subscription, but it also gives you access to challenges and projects where you can test your knowledge, as well as the mobile app.
