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I've been Dataquest for a a little over a month, and have so far really enjoyed my experience. After several false starts trying to learn Python in other places, Dataquest has kept me on track and committed to my learning. They have a TON of courses that really do cover the entire breadth of technical skills some one will need to succeed in data science and related fields. I was able to get great advice about interviewing and my career goals/path from Sabrina in a one-on-one video call that was easy to set up. Overall, I would definitely recommend Dataquest to just about anybody. There are two cons I have encountered so far. The first is that rarely the instructions and solution for a mission don't align very well. I recently did a mission where the instructions explicitly stated to make sure that two steps were done in a certain order, Step A then Step B. I did this, my result looked correct, but the code checker said I had an error somewhere (love that they don't hand you answer unless you ask for it). After reviewing the code myself I finally gave up and asked for the solution - turns out in their code they do it Step B then Step A, totally reversed from the explicit instructions just a few lines above! I encounter this type of mistake very rarely, and I use Dataquest almost every day. The second con is that sometimes the instructions are a little too explicit for my liking and I find myself robotically following them rather than thinking through the problem myself first. The degree to which I find this varies from mission to mission (a product of having different authors and being written at different times I suspect). This is partly due to the fact that I already have a solid background in other coding languages than the ones I'm learning on Dataquest. If you are brand new to coding, I would bet that the level of support/scaffolding is just about right. They do throw in projects and challenges here and there that are meant to have less explicit instructions in them, but I haven't found that to be too consistent between courses.

I've been an on and off Dataquester for a few years now. The only issue I've ever had was cost and my own insecurities about using a paid platform to learn how to code versus trying to be all "homegrown", read: trying to become a professional without paying for one resource. As far as resources go, Dataquest is objectively the best one I've ever put my money down for. It's not like a typical tutorial/course where everything is spoon fed to you, you're actually challenged to do the data mining and analysis techniques yourself but help isn't too far away if you just need to see how to do it. I think as a wannabe data analyst this is a pretty good way to start to build up the willpower to solve problems and challenges that I might face day to day and coding really is an iterative experience so I really find how Dataquest actually presents and imparts that information incredibly useful. They provide everything from slack channels to a community forum to a blog with free tutorials. I have yet to say that all of this actually works because I have yet to actually get a job as a data analyst. However, I do feel more and more confident as I move through the challenges that I can build up my data analyst chops so that definitely is much more than I felt with other courses where it's "here's some information, now copy all of this code, great now you're a programmer and you should have no problem getting a job." I'm not sure what I would improve to be honest. It kind of seems like a very comprehensive platform and in all honesty I have not had the pleasure of diving into everything Dataquest offers only because I've been focused on just the Data Analyst path and not much else.