Whether Udemy is good for learning Python is a question that has no straightforward answer. Udemy is an established and growing online learning platform that offers a range of Python courses, keeping the learner’s background and requirements in mind. Due to all of the options available, ascertaining whether all the various Python courses on the platform are worth your time and money can be challenging. Let’s learn more about the platform and its Python offerings so that we could come to our own conclusions.
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Why Learn Python
Whether you are in the finance or machine learning industry or are seeking a career in data science or web development, Python is one of the essential programming languages you could learn. In fact, it’s what Google uses and Instagram is based on, for example. The language’s simple syntax particularly suits desktops, businesses, and web applications. Its design philosophy emphasizes usability and readability. Python is based on the principle that there must be only one path to doing things. This philosophy has led to a stringent code standardization level. This regulation and a large library that offers different tools make Python ideal for different tasks.
Udemy Python Courses – A Brief Overview
Before getting into the nitty-gritty, let’s overview Udemy’s Python offerings.
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- As of December 2019, Udemy offers more than 1,200 Python courses – 1,225, to be specific.
- These can be filtered based on your skill level: beginner, intermediate, and expert.
- There are more than 500 beginner Python courses. For intermediate learners and experts, the number of courses available are 236 and 27 respectively.
- More than 250 courses have an average learner rating of above 4.5 (out of 5). You may also sieve courses based on their average ratings.
- The majority of these courses are three to six hours in duration – 400 to be exact. More than 150 courses last for 17 hours or more.
- Most of the courses are in the English language – 817 of them. Portuguese, Spanish and Italian are the next three popular languages of instruction – covering 106, 87, and 26 courses respectively.
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Top Python Courses on Udemy
Let’s take a look at the best Python courses on Udemy for different skill levels.
Beginner
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- The Python Bible | Everything You Need to Program in Python
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This is a fun, project-based course for beginners to become professional Python programmers. Comprising 73 lectures spanning just above nine hours in total length, this course is ideal for people who have zero experience in the programming world. The course is replete with quizzes and exercises that help with understanding the theoretical and practical aspects of Python programming. The program starts with a complete introduction to Python basics and gradually builds up from there.
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- The Modern Python 3 Bootcamp
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This course is perhaps the only Python course on Udemy with close to 200 interactive challenges that can be completed right in your browser. The course, in fact, is completely built around these coding exercises. Not to mention, this bootcamp course makes you write code ASAP, instead of sitting and watching a series of videos. This doesn’t mean the course is devoid of videos. In fact, there is more than 25 hours of video content nicely blended with meticulously created quizzes and exercises.
Intermediate
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- Data Science: Deep Learning in Python
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This course is about neural network theory and coding the same using Python and Tensorflow. In other words, the course would help you build an artificial neural network by incorporating deep learning methods. You must consider this course if you’re keen on starting your career in deep learning or interested in data science and machine learning in general. Not to mention, the course transcends basic models such as linear regression and logistic regression.
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- REST APIs with Flask and Python
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This class helps you fully comprehend and develop your REST API and web skills with Python. The course should help you create basic, intermediate, and sophisticated REST APIs, which include deployments, caching, authentication, etc. The program starts with a Python refresher that takes you through the basics of Python and also discusses some extremely advanced Python features. Using Flask and many popular extensions, the course dives right into developing solid, complete, and usage-ready REST APIs.
Expert
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- Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning in Python
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This course takes an in-depth look at natural language processing (NLP). To fully benefit from the course, it’s imperative you have a good understanding of some NLP basics, such as how many NLP issues are simply standard data science and machine learning problems in disguise. Also, you should be aware of basic, practical techniques such as term-document and bag-of-words matrices. These things help with getting some cool things done, such as spam email detection, spinning articles, writing poetry, and grouping together similar words. This course builds up from there and introduces you to new architectures, such as word2vec.
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- Advanced AI: Deep Reinforcement Learning in Python
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This course is basically about applying neural networks and deep learning to reinforcement learning. Compared to unsupervised and supervised learning, reinforcement learning is a completely different form of machine learning. The former techniques are there to analyse and make predictions about data, while the latter is about coaching an agent for interacting with a particular environment and enhancing its reward.
The Good Thing About Learning Python on Udemy
As mentioned before, Udemy offers a fairly large number of advanced courses on Python. This is something most competing learning platforms may not necessarily provide. Probably the most noteworthy feature of learning Python on Udemy is you’ll have access to all course material indefinitely once you buy a course. Such level of access helps every time you want to refresh or brush up on certain concepts of the programming language.
The instructors on the platform are quite responsive and varied. Python instructors on the platform specialize in multiple things, from data analysis to software development, and are well known for their friendly and effective teaching styles for students at various levels.
When compared to traditional in-person coaching or classroom learning, Udemy Python courses are relatively inexpensive. A Udemy Python course can cost you anywhere between $100 and $200. Udemy also offers massive discounts on its courses periodically, bringing down the costs to as little as $10 in certain cases. A traditional Python course, on the other hand, generally costs more than a thousand dollars.
You can learn at your own pace, which should particularly help individuals who are working full-time and cannot dedicate a specific time period during the day to learn Python. Moreover, since the learning is completely online, there is no physical campus participation required. There is no deadline or time-frame to complete a particular class after you’ve purchased or enrolled into a class. The lifetime access means you may finish your course at a pace you are comfortable with.
Udemy Python courses, like every other course on the platform, are updated real-time by instructors based on industry trends. Also, course instructors are available for interactions or Q&As. The Q&A feature of Udemy lets you go through previous instructor answers, ask your own questions, or answer other students’ questions. Such support is more than just handy compared to watching a video or reading text in a vacuum.
The Not-So-Good Thing About Udemy Python Courses
The not so great part about Python courses on Udemy is that pretty much anyone can create courses and have them uploaded to Udemy. In other words, you’ll come across a varied mix of Python instructors. As a result, the quality could fluctuate considerably. You would have to dig your way through to quality course instructors.
Also, the courses are not properly structured, or are piecemeal in nature. If you are someone who wants to learn Python from scratch and graduate to more advanced courses over a period, the lack of proper course structuring on Udemy could leave you sifting through different classes to locate the right course to take next. This lack of consistency to its course flow could be a dealbreaker for some.
Some teachers are slow to progress, while others could move through course contents very quickly, making you play and pause the video and reviewing each step fairly often. If you like a particular instructor’s teaching style, it’s quite possible that you would not find the same instructor teaching you another Python course.
As mentioned earlier, Udemy Python courses can be updated by the providers. However, there is no guarantee the Python course you enrolled for would get updated for certain, even if there has been a paradigm shift in the industry. Moreover, Udemy is under no obligation to chip in and urge the course instructor to make amends to the course. Updates are totally in the individual course owners’ hands.
Conclusion
Udemy certainly offers more than its fair share of good Python courses. But not all courses would work the same way for everybody since things boil down to what you expect from a particular course. If you have some fundamental knowledge of the language, a Python course for absolute beginners would feel redundant. Similarly, if you are a total newbie or have not written code before, an advanced Python learning program would invariably go over your head.
Long story short, your experience with learning Python on Udemy could vary wildly based on the courses you take up – which will end up determining whether Udemy is truly good for learning Python or otherwise.
