Every time I read a slogan like "learn X in Y weeks" or "learn through games instead of lectures", I have to think of a Peter Norvig piece: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.
Honestly instead of taking paid courses that promise to teach incredibly difficult subjects in weeks, just take one of the longer courses like Andrew Ng's that start with the fundamentals and are free. Bootcamp style education is awful.
I'm really sad our culture is encouraging this. I know this is an unpopular opinion and may be seen as gatekeeping by some, but I believe that these "learn X in Y weeks" for deeply technical topics (it's totally fine for X framework) do more harm than good. People who rely on these usually have no real understanding, and just slap something on their resume. As someone involved in hiring, I actively treat anything like this on a resume as a big red flag. If you say you know ML but list some short-term course, I know that you're exaggerating and likely don't have a real understanding. This also tells me that you are likely exaggerating in other parts of your resume and profile too [0]. The same goes for projects. If your "projects" consist of simply calling X library with new data and doing nothing novel, that's a red flag more than anything else. I see this a ton: Just fork some Github project and make a few tiny changes and put it on your resume.
On the other hand, I respect people who are willing to spend the time and effort to truly learn something from scratch. Start with a basic math and ML course, then go on more difficult ones, read papers, implement papers and projects, and so on. The same goes for other topics such as distributed systems, compilers and programming languages, etc. There are no "learn X in Y weeks" shortcuts. I understand that not everyone may be able to do this and many will give up along the way, and I don't think that's a bad thing. It's a great filter.
The course is "Introduction to Reinforcement Learning". We make no claims that you'll be writing papers come the end of 4 weeks! :)
Really interesting reading that Norvig's piece. I agree with almost all of it and think what we're doing at Delta Academy lines up with most of it!
Particularly:
> The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again.
This is exactly what we do - providing weekly challenges that stretch your ability (that also happen to be fun), discussing the approaches taken by teams & giving expert feedback on code.
And his recipe for programming success:
> Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Make sure that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be willing to put in your ten years/10,000 hours.
> Program. The best kind of learning is learning by doing.
> Talk with other programmers; read other programs. This is more important than any book or training course.
> Work on projects with other programmers.
Again - team projects which are fun sound right up his street.
Honestly instead of taking paid courses that promise to teach incredibly difficult subjects in weeks, just take one of the longer courses like Andrew Ng's that start with the fundamentals and are free. Bootcamp style education is awful.
https://norvig.com/21-days.html