How to best spend 5k to learn ML/DL using Python?

Question

Posting for a friend. Her company is giving her $5,000 to spend on a course of her choice. She comes from a statistics background and wants to spend the money on a Python-based machine learning course that has a deep learning component.Any ideas? I know a bunch of the free ones, but have no clue which paid courses are worth it.Thank you.

ac2u · Accepted Answer

Honestly, she should probably just get started with whatever popular free/cheap material there is out there already.
Go broad with the novice/surface level knowledge first in order to be able to map out your known unknowns. Then you can take some of those unknowns to more niche places like forums and subreddits where the paid resource suggestions will deliver far more value for money than committing money early to learn the basics.
However if she wants to optimise for resume stuffing (and because it’s fair to give you some sort of a answer), maybe some aws ML certs mightn’t be a bad idea.
Entirely depends on her motivation.

ZeroSync · Answer

To add on to this, it would be cool if someone could point to resources that one has to pay for but are generally high in quality/or more relevant to todays practices. Regardless of cost and something that is outside of traditional university courses.BradfieldCS is cool, I wonder what other stuff is out there in sub fields like ML/DL, Reverse Engineering, Web Dev etc

scrollaway · Answer

Don't spend it on a course. Start with a free or cheap course for the basics and then get a professional coach with several years of experience to coach her. Direct teaching is the most effective method. (Codementor.io is pretty popular for this)