Gartner's Magic Quadrants as a source for what technologies to study

As a Data Scientists you need to learn a lot. Even if you know a lot you need to learn more. New things and don't stop learning, because you wanna be top. And people on top are at least know about trends if not following them and create them (that's the best choice :-)).

So, the idea is simple, follow up a Gartner's Magic Quadrants which shows all necessary players from specific field and look what is necessary to know, what should be fine and what is optional or even could be omitted. Also we should not forget to see who is novice player and who has been rejected.

Update 4/22/2014: Included pictures of all Gartner's Magic Quadrants mentioned in this post.

Reading: Free online resources March 2014

Last time I promised Hadoop books, but think is there (in the internet) are another books which make bigger buzz:

• The LION Way: Machine Learning plus Intelligent Optimization by Roberto Battiti and Mauro Brunato
• An Introduction to Random Forests for Beginners
• Mining of Massive Datasets by Jure Leskovec, Anand Rajaraman and Jeff Ullman
• Ethics of Big Data by Kord Davis, Doug Patterson
• R Tutorial with Bayesian Statistics Using OpenBUGS by Chi Yau

So, next time maybe little bit more statistics and will see what I will find out interesting...

Course: Data Scientist Enablement Program (DSE)

Data Scientist Enablement Program (DSE) is something which I have found by accident. At the beginning of year I was looking for new courses or some complex study with topics about Data Science and Big Data and have been really keen to learn something new. Then I found form which gave me access to SONO to DSE.

This program and its all 4 modules (so far I have done 1st one, so I am just assuming based on the current experience) are not classic course with video tutorial, quizzes and labs with question form and score. It is almost like in school, you can participate or you can not, you can read and watch materials which you got, but nobody checks if you have done it or not. Only one thing you need to do, is submission of assignment. And even this action is not time limited, so there is no penalty for late submissions, only recommendation to do it ASAP.

Moreover, you will get certificate corresponding to your maturity level in this study and based on your composite score which is computed based on your social engagement, activities, projects, collaboration, etc in all 4 modules.