Introduction to Data Science

The Microsoft's Data Science curriculum is pretty good and has a great collection of courses that are vividly detailed for students to understand each and every concept properly.

Microsoft’s data science courses at edX offer a good introduction to Microsoft’s tools and services related to data science.

They won’t teach you the principles, ideas and basic theory of data science. As such, I wouldn’t recommend them to complete beginners. But if you already master the fundamentals, these courses can be a good way to add additional tools to your tool belt.

It’s good for one of its intended purposes: to provide an introduction to Data Science using Microsoft Tools.

The first 5 courses provide a general introduction to Data Science, with querying databases with T-SQL, Data Exploration and Visualization with PowerBI/Excel, Probability and Statistics (with Excel), Programming Basics in R/Python, and Data Science Essentials. These courses provide a beginner with the basic knowledge of some aspects of Data Science, as well as some practical exercises to test the knowledge of the course taker.

However, in the more advanced courses, things get a bit more complicated. The courses get a bit too hands-on after the halfway mark, and most courses concentrate in Microsoft’s ML platform, AzureML.

The courses seem to be very introductory. In addition, the focus is on learning how to use specific tools from Microsoft. More than a “professional degree” in data science, it seems to be a certification in Microsoft tools for data analysis, akin to be certified in Microsoft database servers. This might have at some point some commercial value in the job market but it will not make anyone into a data scientist.