EMPOWERMENT

DS4A: FOUNDATIONAL PREP MATERIALS

This package provides you with a number of curated resources that will help you
better prepare for the DS4A Empowerment admissions assessment, and to begin
your journey in data & analytics more broadly.

RESOURCES
The key resource we recommend is the book Data Science: A Gentle Introduction.
This is a friendly, fun, and easy-to-read book that will cover almost all the basics
needed to get a strong grounding and orientation in the fundamentals. If you do
not want to read the whole book, you can stop at the probability chapters (chapter
10 and on).

The above book will cover the data literacy and statistical components that are the
bedrock of data & analytics. However, another key component of progressing in
the data & analytics field is logical processing skills. A good way to develop these
skills is to spend time learning how to interpret “pseudocode”. Pseudocode is not
real code - you do not need to know a programming language to understand it -
but it will teach you how to begin thinking like a programmer.

This Codecademy video teaches the basics of pseudocode and walks you through
an example. If you have never seen any code before, from any programming
language (e.g. you do not know what an “if” statement is), you may find the video
a little intimidating. If this is the case, we suggest you work through the short
operator guides provided by the Rebus Community before you watch that video.
These guides are:

Control structures Assignment vs. Equality

If/else statements Logic operators
Relational operations Nested if/else statements

4.