Intro to Data Science (UCB)

A hour ago someone posted on hacker news about this course at UC Berkeley.
You can find the slides and the videos from last year or slides only from this year. The material looks pretty basic but covers data preparation over two weeks which is quite rare but really important.
Coming from a university that basically ignored everything which wasn’t academic, two things stand out.
Firstly, there are guest lectures from people from Google, Optimizely, Yahoo, etc and their lectures are generally quite interesting.
Secondly, the freedom in choosing the final projects is awesome. You can choose freely some data sets which interests you and play with it. There was a wide variety of data from Youtube, Last.fm, basketball to Yelp.

Generally, I think that this is a pretty good intro course into this topic. Most universities try to over-theorize such basic courses and talk in my opinion too much about maths and too little about data gathering and EDA.

Also there was a particularly good comment in the hn thread:

Someone (can’t recall the source, sorry) recently defined “data scientist” as “a data analyst who lives in California.” —baconner