Jamie Bernardi’s tips for getting started in python and machine learning with python.

Learn Python first, cover the basics with a course

Learning the basics

There are 3 options I want to discuss, only one of which. I used myself.

Codeacademy

I used codeacademy to learn python - I would recommend their python3 course, and then other courses that seem interesting you to gain more familiarity. It was good for me because it was interactive - meaning there was a page of text, followed by spaces you can write code and tests you can run (with the click of a button) that give you a nice fuzzy green tick or sad red X if you got it right / wrong. It also covers classes which I think is rare but important for an intro course.

Unfortunately it seems like it’s paid-for now, at $150/year for students. I think if you're serious about learning to code (and learning machine learning), this could be worthwhile since I found it very useful and fun for myself.

You can also do a free trial to do the python3 course, and see if you want to continue before purchasing.

If you’re reading this because you’re interested in skilling-up for doing alignment research, check funding in further resources, if this would help you to get the resources you want the most. I don’t know of cases for being funded so early in a career, but it seems not impossible. Maybe try to use any funding pools from your university too, for such small grants. Feel free to reach out to me first.

https://www.codecademy.com

I recommend python3 first: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-python-3

Other python courses: https://www.codecademy.com/catalog/language/python

Learnpython

Another resource I’ve seen recommended but haven’t tried myself is learnpython.org. It seems important to me that there are interactive elements, and I don't know if that’s the case for this resource, but it looks like it should cover the right stuff.

https://learnpython.org

Kaggle

One more thing I stumbled on is Kaggle’s learn python intro. These seem to be interactive, but don’t cover classes so I imagine it’s non-comprehensive.

https://www.kaggle.com/learn/python

More course (the python ones look very useful): https://www.kaggle.com/learn

Doing a project to learn more Python