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Comment by melvinmt | Hacker News Reader

> the Udacity "Self-Driving Car Engineer" nanodegree

That looks like a great course by the way, thanks for sharing.

I'm one of cr0sh's classmates. I don't have any background in ML/AI/etc, so I've had to supplement the Udacity course materials with a lot of external resources (just finished watching the Stanford CS231n course, which was very helpful), but overall the course been really interesting+fun so far. It's really nice to be exposed to new kinds of tech I've never heard of / used before. Refreshing change from webdev.

If you're strapped for cash and don't want to pay the $800/term, you could definitely learn these things on your own using free online resources. If you don't mind the price, though, I've found this course worth the time+money+effort so far. [they're not paying me to say this :)]

A bit off-topic, but does anyone know how good this[0] course is?

[0] https://www.udacity.com/course/deep-learning--ud730

i was quite put off by it. i feel like the teaching technique is pretty poor and the focus in on all the wrong things. mainly the tech gets in the way for learning. i don't want to figure out how to learn numpy when i'm trying to learn how to understand deep learning, that in itself is hard enough. i quite after a week (i did the stanford course first and this was going to be my second).

i would recommend the coursera course by andrew ng. i had an amazing time. the code stays out of your way and he walks you through the algorithms and explains the theory very well.

i just started the fast.ai by jeremy howard, and literally have been blown away but the course. it is AMAZING! by lesson 3 i'm able to build cnn models and score on top 20% in kaggle competitions. not bad for a complete novice. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

once im done with the fast.ai course i may look back around to google's deep learning course. i think it may be easier for more experienced users to digest its info.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

http://course.fast.ai/

Edit: added fast.ai link

Felt very rushed for a beginner, okay if you have some background.

Personally, I found Stanford dl courses (image classification, nlp) to be much more suitable for beginners.

I'm also a web developer and I plan on taking the SDC nanodegree program in the February.

Ideally, I want to work on self driving cars or AI in my day to day job, but I don't want to get my hopes up. Do you think that after you complete the nanodegree you will attempt to change your career to an SDC engineer or AI/ML engineer? Or is this just meant to fulfill a curiosity of yours?

As someone who's interested in taking the Udacity course, could you understand the course better by answering the following questions? Do you think the course prepares you enough find a Self-Driving developer job? Would you learn enough to compete/work along side people who got their Masters/PhD in Machine Learning? Appreciate your input.

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