Andrew Ng publish a new courses : AI Python for Beginners: Basics of AI Python Coding. This courses teach how to write code (a) Using AI-assistance, which is where the field is going, and (b) to take advantage of generative AI, which allows you to quickly do valuable things with code.
This course is designed for people with zero coding experience to try coding with a chatbot (AI). If you’ve never coded before, I highly recommend giving it a try. It will take 2 to 4 hours, and you don’t need to install any software – you can code directly on the website.
The most valuable aspect of this course is learning How to Succeed in Coding with a Chatbot. This is my summary :
- Think of AI chatbots as your buddy or your coding companion.
- If it doesn’t work the first time around, that’s totally fine. Just try a different approach.
- Ask questions like ‘What if’ or ‘Why’ to help deepen your understanding.
Appendix : Course Notes
These are my notes from when I took this course.
1 Introduce
Many people(like marketing, business reasearch or investing …) finding it useful to write a little bit of code in their work and get things done. If you can learn to write just a little bit of code, you’d be much more effective at many types of work, especially knowledge work.
2 What is computer programming
What is a programming language and how that lets us get computers to do more for us.
3 Writing code with chatbots
Programmers are using chatbots a lot in our daily work and this making many of us more productive.
Previously, if I was stuck with a programming task or didn’t know what to do next, I might have to find an expert to ask. And that could take a while, you know, to find someone, see if they’re available, and so on.
But now, whenever you have a question, you can ask an AI chatbot(ChatGTP, Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini) and get an answer right away.
- prompt : our questions
- completion : the chatbot’s response to the prompt
4 Navigating the learning platform
We don’t just look at code, we’ll actually run code.
Jupyter
5 How to succeed in coding
Test your understanding of how the line of code works. Try asking yourself questions like :
- What do I think will happen if I leave a quotation mark out ?
- If I accidentally have two instead of one closing parentheses and then change the code, run it and see
Think of AI chatbots as your buddy or your coding companion, who knows Python pretty well and is patient and just wants to help you out.
You might think of some “What if” or “why” questions :
- What if I did that ?
- Why is it like that ?
Go ahead and ask the chatbot as many questions as you want.
You can also ask your chatbot to explain code and sometimes asking it :
- How does this code work ?
- What is this doing ?
That might help you understand what a piece of code is actually doing. And this is actually what professional software developers do today as well.
If it doesn’t work the first time around, that’s totally fine. Just try a different approach if you can think of one or ask the chatbot for help.
Consider also reading the chatbots response to see if the chatbot can share with you a new perspective or teach you something, reather than just give you the answer.
Learning to code is really fun, I hope these tips make this even more enjoyable for you.
6 Basic Concepts of Programming Languages
- Data in Python
- combining text and calculations
- variables