My experience with ZTM's ML/DS Bootcamp 2021 Program

If you have got a chance to read my last blogpost on my experience with Applied AI course (AAI), then this one will be the continuation of that. In this post I will try to share my experience with another famous online Data science/Machine Learning course offered by Zero To Mastery also called ZTM in short, created by Andrei Neagoie and Daniel Bourke. The course is available on Udemy & the exact name of the course is “Complete Machine Learning & Data Science Bootcamp 2021.”

After I finished my AAI course materials I took some gap and during my online research I heard about this course many times. Although I am not a great fan of doing multiple courses instead of hands-on experience, as this course was also a recommendation from my company Academy team, I thought about enrolling in it.

Here I am going to compare it directly with AAI as it's the only other course I have taken in a similar field. I need some reference.

Things I like about this ZTM course

1. Entire course is divided into different sections and each section has bite sized videos similar to AAI. Unlike AAI, ZTM’s video clips duration are not more than 15 mins which I liked most (My personal preference).

2. Two dedicated sections completely focused on Python and covers almost all fundamental concepts needed to kickstart. I feel the python content is richer than AAI.

3. Dedicated sections on Pandas, Numpy and matplotlib which is critical to any ML course and mostly other courses out there misses it. AAI also has similar modules but lacking the visualization part.

4. Two end to end code along projects from Kaggle competition which I liked most.

5. A dedicated section on what is Data engineering and what a data engineer do, as nowadays Data Eng., Data Science & ML Eng. work almost identical. I don't see data engineering portion on any other course available on market.

6. Course starts with a visual data science framework & the instructor keeps referring to it throughout the course which helps you understand the DS/ML lifecycle with more clarity. It is missing in AAI.

7. You can make code contributions to the ZTM repositories. Its a great learning on collaborative effort which is a real-world skill people should learn.

Things I do not like about this course

1. The material does not explain the concepts where AAI is deep on concepts. Its not for those who want to start from zero.

2. The core DS/ML Part of the course consists of

   Classical ML

        One Regression Problem
        One classification Problem
   

   Deep Learning

        One Regression problem (From Kaggle)
        One Classification Problem(From Kaggle)
   

3. Not much explanation on the use of the Algos and underlying math.

I will recommend this course to those who already have some theoretical understanding of ML and DL and want to do some practice. The code along project will help you a lot as these are real world problem solving. It also teaches you how to participate in Kaggle competitions. ZTM also has a discord channel where you can reach for any help and in the end of course you will get a completion certificate.

Hopefully this helps you to decide whether this course is good for you or not. Happy Learning!