Visualizing Data with Python – A free course from IBM

This is a free self-study course developed by the IBM Developer Skills Network team that demonstrates the principles of data visualization, using the Python language of course. On Coursera, it is part of IBM’s two professional certifications.

A picture is worth a thousand words – data visualization allows you to extract information from data and communicate it to others.

Using videos and hands-on exercises in Jupyter notebooks, this course is designed to teach many ways to effectively visualize both small and large-scale data. By taking this course, you will be able to take data that at first glance doesn’t make much sense and present it in a way that conveys the point.

Data Visualization with Python will teach you how to work with many data visualization tools and techniques and create different types of basic and advanced charts and graphs. In addition, you will be able to create interactive dashboards that will allow even those with no background in Data Science to better understand data and make better and more informed decisions.

Matplotlib is primarily used for this purpose, and for good reason. While there are many software libraries that visualize data, the main advantage of Matplotlib is that it gives you complete control over your charts, as you can customize all the properties of the charts. The course also introduces four other libraries – Seaborn, Folium, Plotly, and Dash.

Once you master these tools, you will learn how to create interesting charts and graphs and customize them so that they are more effective and appeal to your audience. These include line graphs, area charts, bar charts, bar charts, box charts, pie charts, maps, and informational dashboards.

The course has 19 hours of instruction and consists of five modules. All lessons are accompanied by hands-on exercises in Jupyter notebooks in which you write Python code.

Overall, this is a great course for two reasons. First, you will learn about visualization concepts and when to use a particular type of diagram for a particular case, and second, you will learn how to do it with Python, the defacto tool in data science.

Visualizing Data with Python on Coursera web-site: https://www.coursera.org/learn/python-for-data-visualization