Data science with Microsoft – Training materials

Today I’ll be guiding you through the, sometimes very busy, world of Microsoft training material.
We’ll put the focus on the training material for data science.

Expect everything you need to become fluent with Microsoft’s Data science solutions.

  • Free training courses with certificates
  • Free webinars & recordings of live sessions
  • Free (e-)books
  • Documentation & Learning Paths
  • Microsoft Virtual Academy

Read on for the good stuff!


Training courses

Microsoft has been very active on edX.org.
EdX.org is a training site with high quality content. As with most MOOC you can get a certificate for most of the courses you succesfully participated in.
As said, Microsoft’s experts are very active on this platform, teaching courses on various subjects.

Our edX courses, taught by Microsoft experts, let you learn through hands-on experience with broad reach, cutting-edge technologies in areas including cloud services, mobile development, and data sciences. Whether you’re a student or a seasoned technologist, we can empower you to build innovative applications, services, and experiences on the Microsoft platform that will help you make a meaningful impact in today’s interconnected world.

Welcome to the world of Microsoft technology – choose a path and make your mark.

Some of the current and upcoming courses which you can join for free include

Implementing Real-Time Analytics with Hadoop in Azure HDInsight Started November 2, 2015
Data Science and Machine Learning Essentials Started November 15, 2015 – Self-paced
Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Power BI Starts November 24, 2015
Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Excel Starts Deccember 1, 2015 – Self-paced
Implementing Predictive Analytics with Hadoop in Azure HDInsight Starts January 18, 2016
Querying with Transact-SQL Anytime – Self-paced
Introduction to R Programming Anytime – Self-paced

Webinars & Recordings of live sessions

Apart from the training provided by Microsoft Experts, there has always been a steady stream of incredible webinars by the product teams.
Some high level and some very in-depth.

Some are found on the product sites, some are on Channel 9.

The Future of Analytics
Data Science for the rest of us
Cortana Analytics Suite: Transform data into intelligent action
Tutorial: Data Science with Cortana Analytics
Using the Cortana Analytics Process
Cortana Analytics Perceptual APIs
Cortana Analytics for Retail Pricing
Cortana Analytics: Building a recommendations model in 5 minutes!

(e-)books

 

Data Science in the Cloud with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning and R: 2015 Update  Take some time to explore Microsoft’s Azure machine learning platform, Azure ML—a production environment that simplifies the development and deployment of machine learning models. In this updated and expanded O’Reilly report, Stephen Elston from Quantia Analytics uses a complete data science example (forecasting hourly demand for a bicycle rental system) to show you how to manipulate data, construct models, and evaluate models with Azure ML.
Microsoft Azure Essentials: Azure Machine Learning  This third ebook in the “Microsoft Azure Essentials” series introduces Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, a service that a developer can use to build predictive analytics models (using training datasets from a variety of data sources) and then easily deploy those models for consumption as cloud web services. The ebook presents an overview of modern data science theory and principles, the associated workflow, and then covers some of the more common machine learning algorithms in use today
Introducing Microsoft Azure HDInsight  In Introducing Microsoft Azure HDInsight, we cover what big data really means, how you can use it to your advantage in your company or organization, and one of the services you can use to do that quickly—specifically, Microsoft’s HDInsight service. We start with an overview of big data and Hadoop, but we don’t emphasize only concepts in this book—we want you to jump in and get your hands dirty working with HDInsight in a practical way

Documentation & Learning paths

Cortana Analytics Process The Cortana Analytics Process (CAP) is a systematic data science method that outlines a sequence of steps that leverages advanced analytics to build intelligent applications. The CAP steps provide guidance on how to define the problem, analyze relevant data, build and evaluate predictive models, and then deploy those models in intelligent applications.
Azure ML CheatSheet The Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Algorithm Cheat Sheet helps you choose the right machine learning algorithm for your predictive analytics solutions from the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning library of algorithms.
Learn Data Lake Store Data Lake Store is a hyper-scale repository for big data analytic workloads that stores every type of data regardless of its size, structure, or how fast it is ingested. This learning path will help you understand how to use Data Lake Store.
Learn Data Lake Analytics Azure Data Lake Analytics is built to make big data analytics easy. This service lets you focus on writing, running and managing jobs, rather than operating distributed infrastructure. Instead of deploying, configuring and tuning hardware, you write queries to transform your data and extract valuable insights.
Learning path for Azure Data Factory Data Factory is a cloud-based data integration service that orchestrates and automates the movement and transformation of data. Follow the guidance on this page for an effective learning path through Data Factory content.
Learn Hadoop on HDInsight (Linux)
Learn Hadoop on HDInsight (Windows)
In HDInsight, you can work with big data in the cloud by using Hadoop, HBase, Apache Storm, and customized clusters. This learning path will help you learn Hadoop and its components so you can start to manage, analyze, and report on big data with high reliability and availability in HDInsight.
SQL Database SQL Database is a relational database service in the cloud based on the Microsoft SQL Server engine. Use the topics in this learning path to create, configure, and develop with SQL databases.
SQL Database – use elastic database features and tools The elastic database features of Azure SQL Database are designed to simplify data tier development and management especially for Software as a Service (SaaS) developers—where large numbers of databases are used to support a dynamic end-customer base.
Stream Analytics Learning Path Learn how you can rapidly develop and deploy low-cost analytics solutions with Azure Stream Analytics service in the cloud. Uncover real-time insights from devices, sensors, infrastructure, and applications.

Microsoft Virtual Academy

Make Microsoft’s Virtual Academy your first or last stop when learning, but you should always pay it a visit!
It’s filled with incredible information broken down in some great free courses.

It seems that (at least some of) the closed edX.org courses are being placed on here, so you can follow up on them at your own pace.
Do be aware that you can’t receive certificates on Microsoft Virtual Academy.

I’ve listed several courses you might find relevant in your data science travels.
Go check out this incredible platform, for some, it might be the only thing you’ll ever need when combined with practical experience.

Data Science and Machine Learning Essentials Interested in data science? Demand for data science talent is exploding. Learn the essentials, with experts from MIT and the industry, partnering with Microsoft, to help develop your career as a Data Scientist.

Find out how to build and derive insights from data science and machine learning models. Explore key concepts in data acquisition, preparation, exploration, and visualization, and take a look at how to build a cloud data science solution using Azure Machine Learning, R, and Python.

Implementing Big Data Analysis Working with big data? Need to make more sense of it, for your own information and for others in your organization? Watch this Jump Start to learn how to use Windows Azure HDInsight for big data processing. In addition, find out how to generate results for better big data analysis and reporting by using Microsoft data tools, including Microsoft SQL Server 2014 and Office.
Big Data Analytics with HDInsight: Hadoop on Azure Would you like to make sense of the volumes of data, and to use that data to streamline your workload? You can visualize your data and make it work for you. Find out how with leading experts on big data analytics with Microsoft Azure HDInsight and Hadoop.
Building Recommendation Systems in Azure Machine Learning or Data Science are one of today’s hottest buzzwords. The scenarios in which Machine Learning can be applied are diverse and can range from predicting football scores to personalised recommendations in online shops to predictive maintenance in manufacturing. In this Microsoft Virtual Academy course I will go through various options on how to build recommendation systems using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, and thus going beyond just finding the products in retail that are in high demand.
You’ve Got Documents! A MongoDB Jump Start Wondering what the buzz is all about with NoSQL? If you’re an open source developer and you want to store unstructured data, see why MongoDB, a scalable document-oriented database, is so popular in this arena, plus explore how to use it on Azure.
Getting Started with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning If you’re not a data scientist, but you’re interested in data mining and predictive analytics, and you want to go beyond just reporting the numbers, check out this course on Azure Machine Learning (ML). ML is the inexpensive, easy-to-access, and powerful predictive analytics offering from Microsoft.

Did you learn something from this post? Is there something you think I should add?
Let me know in the comments or via twitter!

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