Source: torringtontribune.com
A new 44-part video series called ‘Python for Beginners’ is being offered on YouTube by Microsoft. The Python series, consisting of three to four minute lessons. are taught by two staff members who love programming and teaching.
But this series of free lessons isn’t really for total beginners. Microsoft assumes that people who sign up have previously done some programming in JavaScript or may have used a visual programing language targeted for kids called ‘Scratch’ which was developed by MIT.
The purpose of this free training is to help infuse ambitions in beginners to build their own machine-learning apps, or applications or even build automated processes on a desktop computer.
To assist students in their training on ‘Pythons for Beginners,’ Microsoft has also provided additional resources which include slides and code samples on a page called GitHub.
Microsoft staff members who are teaching the ‘Python for Beginners’ series are Christopher Harrison, who is a senior program manager at Microsoft, and Susan Ibach, who is one of Microsoft’s AI Gaming unit’s business development manager.
Microsoft has several reasons why it wants more people to know Python which is already very popular and easy to learn. Python has a lot of libraries which assist and allow app developers to interface with Google-developed TensorFlow as well as Microsoft’s Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) which are both machine-learning frameworks.
Developers can also use VS Code on their local PC in order to edit code stored on other remote machines, or containers, and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) operating systems because Microsoft has built better support for Python in its Visual Studio Code (VS Code) editor.
In Microsoft’s marketplace for developers, the most popular extension is its own Python extension for VS Code and the VS code in itself has become hugely poplar among developers everywhere. Through the company’s distribution
of its popular Anaconda Python, it has made the VS Code available as part of its focus on AI.
Microsoft’s main benefit though for offering free training for Python is to expand the number of Python developers who would be using Azure in order to build AI apps. Azure Machine Learning Studio already has built-in support for Python and recently last August of this year, Microsoft announced complete Azure Machine Learning support for its PyTorch 1.2 which is a machine-learning framework for Python within Facebook’s AI research team.
