microsoft/data-science-for-beginners

Data Science for Beginners is a free, open curriculum produced by Microsoft's Azure Cloud Advocates, structured as a 10-week, 20-lesson self-paced course introducing data science from the ground up. It is designed for complete beginners, no prior data science experience required. The curriculum covers the full data science process: what data science is and why it matters, data ethics and responsible data use, working with relational and non-relational data, data collection and preparation, statistics fundamentals, probability and quantitative reasoning, data visualization (how to present findings with charts and graphs), and finally real-world applied projects where learners practice the complete workflow end to end. Each lesson follows a consistent structure: a pre-lesson quiz to prime your thinking, written lesson content with concepts explained from scratch, hands-on exercises in Jupyter Notebooks (interactive documents where you write and run real Python code), a post-lesson quiz to reinforce what you learned, and an assignment. This project-based approach means you practice skills as you learn them rather than absorbing theory passively. You would use this curriculum if you are new to data science and want a guided, structured path that covers all the fundamentals, from understanding what data is to building your first data visualizations and analysis pipelines. It is also useful as a structured refresher for people who have some programming background but are new to the data science workflow. The tech stack is Python, using libraries like Pandas (for data manipulation) and Matplotlib or Seaborn (for visualization). Lessons are delivered as Jupyter Notebooks. The course can be run in GitHub Codespaces (a cloud environment) or locally. Translations are available in over 50 languages.