June 24, 2016

7 Great Data Science Newsletters to Keep You Informed

In a fast-paced and rapidly growing industry like data science, keeping up is essential. Knowing what is trending is essential in helping you know what new tools to learn, to help you get a job, and much more. At the same time, there is so much content out there that it can be hard to know what to read and easy to be overwhelmed. The solution is to turn to email newsletters, which can help you keep a handle on the latest news, tools and tutorials. These great newsletters give you everything you need to know to keep up with the world of data science. Their creators put in the hard work so that you don't have to. Here are my picks for the seven best data science newsletters.

1. Data Elixir

data-elixir Data Elixir is curated weekly by Lon Reisberg, self-confessed technology geek who has an extremely prestigious work history including working for NASA. Hitting your inbox every Friday, Data Elixir has been sending the best data science news and resources to data lovers since 2014. Data Elixir is a good all-rounder, with a mix of news, opinion and tutorials. Lon also maintains a data science jobs board and includes the latest job listings in each week's email.

2. The Data Science Roundup

Data Science Roundup Data Science Roundup was first launched by RJMetrics. More recently, as RJMetrics has been split into two different companies and sold, the 'roundup' has become independent, and sponsored by Fishtown Analytics and Stitch. Every Sunday, Data Science Roundup arrives in your inbox at the perfect time for some weekend downtime reading. Rather than providing an extensive list of articles, DS Roundup usually includes just four or five great reads. Data Science Roundup is compiled by Tristan Hardy, and the one thing I really love is the synopsis he puts together of each article. It's very plain spoken and easy to read, and it means that even if I don't have time to read every article, I can still get the key takeaways.

3. Data Science Weekly

Data Science Weekly Since 2013, Hannah Brooks (business strategy expert) and Sebastian Gutierrez (data viz & D3.js ninja) have been compiling Data Science Weekly, hand selecting the very best articles and sending them out each Thursday morning. DSW also conduct some fantastic Data Science Interviews and maintain a really thorough list of Data Science Resources including books, meetups, datasets, blogs and data scientists on twitter. Each issue of Data Science weekly starts with their Editors Picks fo the best articles from the previous week, followed by longer lists for data science articles and tutorials, providing the perfect balance to help you keep your finger on the data science pulse.

4. KDnuggets News

KDnuggets News There is something beautifully comforting about the canary yellow color scheme of KDnuggets. Possibly the most comprehensive of all data science websites, KDnuggets has been lovingly maintained by Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro for over 20 years. With over 649 issues dating back to the first on August 20, 1993, this is easily the oldest newsletter in our list. Originally published twice a month, but now weekly on Wednesdays, KDnuggets News is a compilation of the more than 30 articles posted to KDnuggets each week. KDnuggets news is purely a list of links without any summaries, but even still it's one of the most comprehensive roundups of what has happened in the week before which makes it well worth subscribing to.

5. O'Reilly Data Newsletter

O'Reilly Data Newsletter I remember my first O'Reilly book, Programming Perl, which I purchased back in 1996. Many data scientists and software engineers learned to program from O'Reilly publications, with their distinctive animal covers and their quality considered second to none. Since as far back as the 1980's, O'Reilly have been publishing books on data, however in the last 6 years with the introduction of their Strata + Hadoop World conferences, O'Reilly has become a powerhouse in the data world. Their weekly data newsletter features a great mix of news, editorial, how-tos and case studies, both from O'Reilly themselves and others. I particularly like how they group clusters of articles on a particular news story or feature together to provide a balanced perspective.

6. The Analytics Dispatch

The Analytics Dispatch The Analytics Dispatch has been curated by Mode Analytics since December 2015. Mode make an analytics platform that lets you use SQL and Python notebooks to create reports and visualizations from almost any data source. It's a great product - we use it at Dataquest for our own analysis and love it! (They didn't do anything to get this testimonial except make a great product). Every Monday morning, The Analytics Dispatch hits your inbox with a great mix of articles on data. Because of what they do, the articles tend to cover the more analysis topics (including lots of SQL) and because of this I find them highly practical - I'm always learning something from the articles they post that can improve my day-to-day work.

7. Dataquest Download

Dq-download Of course, I can't leave out our own newsletter, the Dataquest Download. Each Monday we highlight some top news stories, pass along great career advice, and try to inspire you with cool projects and helpful learning resources. You can subscribe simply by signing up for a free Dataquest account. And of course, we've also got the blog, which is kind of like a huge back-catalog of newsletter links to read through. Here are a few of our favorite and most read posts:

To subscribe, simply fill in your email in the box at the bottom of the page.

Did I miss something?

Is your favorite data science newsletter missing from the list?

Get in touch and let me know!

Celeste Grupman

About the author

Celeste Grupman

Celeste is the Director of Operations at Dataquest. She is passionate about creating affordable access to high-quality skills training for students across the globe.

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