Course Review: Data Analytics on Google Cloud (Pluralsight)

Taking advantage of the #FreeApril Pluralsight initiative, and considering I wanted to learn the fundamentals about BigQuery, I took the Data Analytics on Google Cloud path, which consists on four courses and in total 12-something hours of content.

Grabbed from the official page, a summarized description reads: "This path teaches how to derive insights through data analysis and visualization using the Google Cloud Platform. Feature interactive scenarios and hands-on labs where participants explore, mine, load, visualize, and extract insights from diverse Google BigQuery datasets. Cover data loading, querying, schema modeling, optimizing performance, query pricing, and data visualization.".

• Exploring and Preparing your Data with BigQuery: Beginner course (4.5h) about SQL and BigQuery and some CloudDataPrep, which makes sense as data ingestion is the first step.

• Creating New BigQuery Datasets and Visualizing Insights: Intermediate course (2.5h), heavily focused on BigQuery and data ingestion from external sources (online, and local files), SQL JOINs and UNIONs, and an introduction to Google Data Studio.

• Achieving Advanced Insights with BigQuery: Advanced course (3.5h), now getting into advanced SQL and BigQuery features, including using arrays and structs to nest and unnest data, performance optimizations and an intro to Cloud Datalab (Google's Jupyter Notbook solution)

• Applying Machine Learning to your Data with GCP: Advanced course (~3h), about how to do Machine Learning with BigQuery data, and inside BigQuery (this is the awesome part), by creating models, training and validating them.

The labs allow you to practice on your own, but you also get "fully guided" videos solving them, which is good for both cases of wanting to do them or preferring to just watch how they're done.

The courses are great, and my only complaint is that volume is not normalized among the videos, some are really low while others are fine, so you need to take care of the volume between them. Otherwise the production quality is very professional, you can clearly notice it is "official" Google built content.