Data Science is one of the emerging fields today. A lot of people are opting for analytics courses online, or searching for the best data analytics course online so that they can get a hold of this topic.
But is that going to be enough? Doing a data analyst course online is definitely going to be beneficial for you, and you will gain a lot of knowledge from it. However, self-study is just as important. You will get the best results if you are studying more from some fantastic resources.
Here are some of the best free books online that will be quite useful in your journey of becoming a data analyst.
1. The Field Guide to Data Science by Booz Allen Hamilton
This is a book purely for beginners. However, even if you are not a novice in the field of data structures and algorithms, you can refer to this book to clear your basics.
This book is written by the employees of the Booz Allen Hamilton company. It has all the information about the tools necessary to work with the area, for example, which high-level programming language can be used, the basics of the domain, its applications, and so on.
2. Data mining and analysis by Mohammed J. Zaki and Wagner Meira Jr.
This book has the mathematical part of data science covered. It’s like one of those crash courses on analytics you can do online. It clears concepts like data mining, integrating, data analysis, classification using different data structures and algorithms, clustering, and on. Basically, everything on the mathematical side that a data analyst should know and learn.
That’s not all, apart from covering all these basic topics it also goes through some of the complicated concepts like high-dimensional data analysis and complex graphs and networks.
3. Python Data Science Handbook
Python is one of the best high-level programming languages for studying data science. And one of the best books to do that is this one. It is one of the easiest books to read and interpret.
The concepts have been explained in such a way that even a beginner can become quite a proficient data analyst after reading this. Before doing a data analyst course online, you can refer to this book. It is going to make the outcome of the course much more fruitful.
The book has concepts as well as the Jupyter notebooks for these concepts. So, that way, it is actually one of the best analytics courses by itself.
4. Executive Data Science
Now, this is one of the best books if you are in the process of hiring a data analyst for your team. It will guide you through the entire process of how to hire people and then build a team out of them.
You should definitely check this book out if you are thinking about making your own team or expanding your existing team.
5. An Introduction to Statistical Learning
This book is easy to understand and very useful if you want to focus on the statistics part of data science. To put it clearly, this book is a simpler version of The Elements of Statistical Learning. It has made the concepts easier to understand and more approachable.
The book focuses on the R language and its applications. Now, it is not a high-level programming language. So, the codes may be lengthy. However, it is still a good language to learn statistics. If you are doing a data analyst course online which uses the R language, this can be a good option for you.
6. The Elements of Statistical Learning
Full disclosure, it is a complicated book. However, it is also the most detailed book. This book explains the concepts of statistics and data science on a deeper level. And it may take time to get used to the way this book is written. But, it is one of the best free resources available on the internet. You will have a deeper understanding of the data structures and algorithms involved in data science once you’ve gone through this book.
Start this book only if you are willing to invest your time sincerely into learning. Once you get the hang of it, it is a wonderful experience reading this book. After reading this book, any analytics courses that you do online or offline are going to become fairly easy to understand because you will have a profound understanding of the topic.
Now, these are some of the finest data science books out there that you can read for free. You should definitely check these out if you want to look at learning data science.
