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Online Courses

Taking online courses is an extremely good way to learn coding, algorithm, or other computation skills for me. Here I listed some good courses that I took.

Tip

Coursera's courses aren't cheap. If you buy one course at a time, it's usually $79 per course. If you subscript a specialization (which is a series of courses) it's $49 per month. However, if you don't have any credit cards bonded to the website yet(or register a new account if you already did), you can audit without paying anything. You can't take quizzes, submit any projects, or get any certificate. But if you just want to learn the material, it might be a good choice.

Data Science Specialization

@coursera, by JHU

  • This is a very thorough and well-structured series courses with 10 courses about statistics and R, hosted by the department od Biostatistics in John Hopkins University. It stats with the very basic R programming, then into statistics theoreis (distribution and linear model). It has a very inspiring course called "reproducible research" which I think is extremely necessary for us when handling with big datasets.

  • Same as the one below, this specialization is free to audit, and $49 per month is you enroll it to get certificates. The first week is free, and I finished the 9/10 in only two months.

Genomic Data Science

@coursera, by JHU

  • This is also a series course with 8 courses, also hosted by JHU. This course is extremely useful especially when you want to work with microbiome data, proteomic data, or any HTS(high through-put sequencing) data. It covers the NGS sequencing theory, and the genomic sequences alignment algorithm (with python), unix system operation (most genomic tools were developed in linux platform, such as the QIIME2), and then data analysis.

Bioinformaitcs Specialization

@coursera, by UCSD

  • This is an replacement of the course above. It was recommended by many people but I didn't take it.

Python for Everybody

@coursera, by UMich

  • A wonderful series of courses of python for absolute beginners. The professor is very funny and very easy to understand. It teaches the most fundamental data structure and programming skills of python.