I like Codecademy's format of having a bit of information that is followed immediately by an opportunity to try it myself. I like learn-by-doing as a beginner, even if the teaching/learning environment can be limited at times. But one thing that I didn't like was the fact if I am to put my Python knowledge to use, I would have to venture outside of the learning environment and Codecademy didn't used to provide information how.

The Learn Python 3 course made effort to help students work outside of the Codecademy environment with "Off-Platform Project". These came in the form of Jupyter notebooks that I could download, and a page with some instructions on how to use them: a link to Codecademy's command line course, a link to instructions for installing Python on my own computer, and a link on installing Jupyter notebooks. It's a bit scattered.

What I didn't know at the time was that Codecademy had already assembled an entire course covering these points. Getting Started Off Platform for Data Science is an orientation for everyone as we eventually venture off Codecademy's learning platform. It starts with an introduction to the command line, then Python development tools like Jupyter Notebooks and other IDEs, wrapping up with an introduction to Github. This is great! Why didn't they put more emphasis on this earlier? I think it would have been super helpful to beginners.

Though admittedly, I didn't follow those installation instructions anyway. Python isn't very good about library version management and the community has sidestepped the issue by using virtual environments to keep Python libraries separated in different per-project worlds. I've used venv and Anaconda to do this, and recently I've also started playing with Docker containers. For my own trip through Codecademy's off-platform projects using Jupyter notebooks, I ran Jupyter Lab using their jupyter/datascience-notebook Docker image. That turned out to be sheer overkill and I probably could have just used the much lighter-weight jupyter/base-notebook image.

In hindsight I think it would have been useful for me to review Getting Started Off Platform for Data Science before I started reorienting myself with Python. I wouldn't have followed it by the letter, but it had information that would have been useful beforehand. But as fate had it, it became the final course I took in the beginner-friendly section before I started trying intermediate courses.