data-science-for-beginners

Data Science for Beginners is a free, project-based curriculum published by Microsoft's Azure Cloud Advocates. It spans 10 weeks and 20 lessons covering the foundations of data science, from definitions and ethics through data preparation, visualization, the data science lifecycle, and cloud-based workflows. Each lesson includes a pre-lesson warmup quiz, written instructions, a post-lesson quiz, a challenge, supplemental reading, and an assignment. Project-oriented lessons also provide step-by-step build guides and solution code. The curriculum is organized into six groups: Introduction (defining data science, ethics, defining data, statistics and probability), Working With Data (relational and NoSQL data, Python with Pandas, data preparation), Data Visualization (quantities, distributions, proportions, relationships, meaningful visualizations), Lifecycle (introduction, analyzing, communication), Cloud Data (cloud data science, low-code training, deploying models with Azure Machine Learning Studio), and In the Wild (real-world examples). The repository ships with a quiz application containing 40 quizzes of three questions each, which can be run locally or deployed to Azure. A dedicated examples directory offers beginner-friendly, well-commented code covering a hello-world program, loading data, simple analysis, basic visualization, and a complete real-world project. Documentation includes installation, usage, troubleshooting, contributing, and teacher guidance, plus a code of conduct and translation guidelines. The material is available in 50+ languages through an automated GitHub Action translation workflow, and the README documents sparse-checkout commands to clone the repository without the large translations directory. The course can be taken in whole or in part, and learners can work through it independently, in study groups, or in a classroom setting. It is intended for complete beginners as well as educators looking for ready-made teaching material.