IBM datascienceworkbench

If you are looking to get started with Data Science and Cloud Computing then you should get an IBM Big Data University account and that will give you access to a IBM Data Science virtual machine or datascienceworkbench account.

I have been really impressed with the IBM datasceienceworkbench. You will have ability to upload data, to work with the your data using OpenRefine, you will have access to Jupyter Notebooks and RStudio, for working with Spark you have access to Zeppelin Notebooks, and finally to visually work with Spark, Seahorse.

One note, when you create your account for the datascience

workbench, make sure you select Toronto and not Hong Kong. My original account hosted in Hong Kong did not work so well. I suppose I should go back and try it again to see if it is still having problems.

Getting started with RStudio is the cloud is fun and easy with the IBM datascienceworkbench. I would recommend you start there.

To learn about Big Data and Data Science I would recommend the IBM Big Data University courses, BigData101 and Data Science 101. There are many other very interesting courses posted, such as R 101 and Python 101. And the Deep Learning 101 course is super interesting.

Final thing to mention is that the use of all of this is free. So get started today.