DataCamp Review [2020]

I’ve been testing DataCamp over the past several weeks to bring you a comprehensive DataCamp Review. 

Should you sign up for DataCamp in 2020? 

We’ll look at their curriculum - including what programming languages are covered and the overall setup of DataCamp. We’ll also talk about their learning style, cost, and community / support. 

Then, based on my 15 years of analytics experience, I’ll tell you whether I recommend signing up for DataCamp...or choosing another option...

What is DataCamp?

DataCamp is an online platform for learning data science skills and programming languages.

Their main message focuses on building data science skills so while that certainly includes knowledge of a programming language, they aren’t targeting people that are looking at programming without a data science flavor to it.

DataCamp Curriculum

DataCamp offers hundreds of courses as well as projects and assessments. While you can take these individually in any order you choose, the main structure of DataCamp is based on their Career and Skills Tracks.

Career Tracks & Skills Tracks

DataCamp offers 14 career tracks and 43 skill tracks. 

Both career tracks and skills tracks are built on different sets of courses. The career tracks are more broad - covering many more courses and topics. The skills tracks are more focused on specific skills so they’re quicker to do. 

DataCamp estimates the length of time needed to complete each of the tracks so you can easily see what time you’ll need to complete the training. The duration varies from track to track since the number of courses within them also vary.

DataCamp Career Tracks include options for programmer, but their main focus is on data analytics and data science so this is what most of the career tracks center around. 

DataCamp Programming Languages

Because the main focus is in this data science area the programming languages they offer as options are the most popular ones for data science - Python, R, and SQL.

DataCamp Courses

DataCamp offers 327 different courses crossing a variety of technologies.

DataCamp courses include additional technology beyond the main Python, R, SQL focus. There are also introductory courses in Git, Shell, Tableau, and Scala as well as a handful of other isolated courses.

Courses are generally 4 hours long with some minor variations.

DataCamp Assessments

There are several assessments you can take to find out where your skills are.

These are all designed to adapt to the skills you show to get a finer read on where you currently stand.

DataCamp Projects

Once you’ve learned different skills within DataCamp, you can move into projects. These projects give you the opportunity to practice the skills you’ve built in the courses.

Each project centers around 1 or more specific objectives like data manipulation, data visualization, or case studies. Most projects are heavily guided. This is a great step when you’re just starting into practicing your skills. You can get assistance at different stages and improve your work.

I’d like to see more projects that push you to figure out an end goal and not walk you through every step of the way, but I also acknowledge this would be difficult to offer automated support since there’s usually multiple approaches that can work to get to the same goal. 

DataCamp Learning Style

DataCamp’s learning style is based around teaching and then practicing.

You watch videos and then jump into exercises. With the exercises, you walk through how to do each step in a practice round. Then, you’re given an assignment to practice what you’ve just been taught. These practice assignments often vary slightly from the examples, adding more complexity.

You get immediate feedback on your code when you check it. If you got it wrong, you can choose to retry or to get a hint to help you.

In going through some of these practice exercises, I noticed that if you put in a different answer than they were expecting, but you got the right result, it still marked this as correct.

I’m a bit torn on this.

Ideally it would be nice if it alerted you that your answer was right, but they wanted to see an answer that used the concept they just taught. ​

I know this seems like I’m just being picky, but when you’re just learning, it can be good to be reminded that there are more efficient ways to code. Since this is the main feedback you get on your skills, it’s good to be reminded that elegance in code can really set you apart over time vs brute forcing your way through it. Same results - but you’ll be quicker and your code will be cleaner if you adopt to the more efficient methods early on.

DataCamp’s learning style is great if you’re a person who learns best by doing. While you get a bit of theory up front, it’s really focused on having you jump in, learn and adjust.

There’s also some gamification to the learning style as you earn experience points for everything you complete correctly and can “pay” with experience points to get hints along the way. 

DataCamp Cost

DataCamp has 3 pricing levels for individuals as well as team options for companies interested in training for 5 or more employees.