How to: May 5, 2023
1. Learn to code in Python from one of the greatest living Computer Science professors, Harvard's David J. Malan. This is the newest course in freeCodeCamp's partnership with Harvard. It will teach you Python programming fundamentals like functions, conditionals, loops, libraries, file I/O, and more. If you are new to Python, or to coding in general, this is an excellent place to start. (16 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-python-from-harvard-university/

2. And if you want to use your Python for data science, this course on Regression Analysis will help you understand relationships in your data. You'll learn concepts that underpin many machine learning algorithms, such as Linear Regression, Polynomial Regression, Feature Engineering, and more. And you'll reinforce your understanding along the way by coding several Python projects. (10 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/master-regression-analysis-for-machine-learning/

3. There's not a public API for everything. Sometimes developers have to resort to scraping. Scraping is a technique where you extract data directly from a webpage. And Python makes scraping so much easier. This course will teach you how to code your own Scrapy spider to crawl websites. Then you'll learn how to clean your data, build pipelines, and ultimately automate the entire process in the cloud. (5 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/use-scrapy-for-web-scraping-in-python/

4. But if you have a website of your own and you don't want people to scrape it, you can provide an API for them instead. This freely available REST API Handbook will teach you how to code your own API using Node.js and Express. You'll also learn how to write tests for your API to ensure it works reliably. This is very important if you don't like waking up late at night to fix outages. You'll even learn how to document your API using a tool called Swagger. (full book): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/build-consume-and-document-a-rest-api

5. You may have run Git's Merge command before. You may even have messed up a Git Merge before, resulting in a lot of extra work for yourself. To many, Git Merge is a mystery. But to you, no more. This definitive guide to Git's Merge feature will finally put those ambiguities to rest. And for the rest of your life, when you do a Git Merge, you'll do so with confidence that you actually understand what the heck is going on. (1 hour read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-definitive-guide-to-git-merge/

It's been an amazing week for open learning resources. And these are just some of the books and courses the freeCodeCamp community published this week.

If you haven't read my book yet, you should. It's called "How to Learn to Code and Get a Developer Job" and it's fully available on freeCodeCamp. It's really long, so you can bookmark it and read it at your own pace: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-to-code-book/

Quote of the Week: *"Python is a truly wonderful language. When somebody comes up with a good idea, it takes about 1 minute and five lines to program something that almost does what you want. Then it takes only an hour to extend the script to 300 lines, after which it still does almost what you want."* — Jack Jansen, Scientific Programmer and Software Engineer