The response to this question tends to be a long list of courses to take and books to read, starting with linear algebra or statistics. I went through this myself a few years ago when I was learning. I had no programming background, but knew that I wanted to work with data.
I can't fully explain how immensely unmotivating it is to be given a huge list of resources without any context. It's akin to a teacher handing you a stack of textbooks and saying "read all of these". I struggled with this approach when I was in school. If I had started learning data science this way, I never would have kept going.
Instead, I think you should focus more on:
- Learn to love data: You need something that will motivate you to keep learning, even when it's midnight, formulas are starting to look blurry, and you're wondering if this will be the night that neural networks finally make sense.
- Learn data science by doing: By working on projects, you gain skills that are immediately applicable and useful. You also have a nice way to build a portfolio.
- Learn to communication insights: Data scientists constantly need to present the results of their analysis to others. Skill at doing this can be the difference between an okay and a great data scientist.
- Learn from your peers: It's amazing how much you can learn from working with others. In data science, teamwork can also be very important in a job setting.
- Constantly increase the degree of difficulty: Are you completely comfortable with the project you're working on? Was the last time you used a new concept a week ago? It's time to work on something more difficult. Data science is a steep mountain to climb, and if you stop climbing, it's easy to never make it.
This is admittedly not a roadmap of exactly what to do, rather it’s a rough set of guidelines to follow as you learn data science. If you do all of these things well, you'll find that you're naturally developing data science expertise.
Check out our blog posts on this topic to learn more:
How to Actually Learn Data Science
Learning Data Science: A Better Way