Swapping to data science

Hello!

Glad to hear you are interested in Data Science. I started from a computer engineering background before transitioning into data science and have found the skills learned from software to be greatly useful. I currently work on a team that focuses on tools and ML for data science which is one area that you could look at focusing in, among many others!

Since you already have the coding background, I would say other relevant skills would be statistics / math, data cleaning and ETL processes, data exploration, data analysis, machine learning, big data handling, data story telling and visualization.

A good book to look at is An Introduction to Statistical Learning: With Applications in R, this was a great read and very helpful. I still keep a copy at work. If you are looking for another good read, more software focused, Clean Code by Robert Cecil Martin is a great book in how to write well structured code that is easy to read, I believe it is focused on Java but I apply the same skills to Python. O'Reilly has tons of good books on data science and Python as well, so look into that publisher.

If you are looking for tools, here are just a few to consider: Jupyter Notebooks, Github (and similar version control systems), Spark and Hadoop for big data processing, databases, Tableau and other BI tools, Python visualization libraries (Bokeh, Matplotlib, etc.).

I would also recommend looking into the types of open source data sets available to see if you prefer different types of data over others, such as spacial data, image processing, structured or unstructured documents, etc.

There is so much you can look into, just pick somewhere to start and run with it. Best of luck!