Im my journey through data analytics, what helped me most is to fight with real datasets. Lectures are fine, but you don't really grasp the little details needed to do a proper job until you have messy datasets, very large datasets, have to deal with text in a non-english language, etc.<p>That's the most useful stuff in my opinion. Courses and lectures include sample data that don't really put you in the position to having no option than optimize your workflow because your box can't deal with it in a reasonable time.<p>Or when you go crazy because you can't perform some analysis because something somewhere is wrong and your debugger can't help you, and you just want to punch someone in the face.<p>That's how I discovered that cleaning and preparing data is about 90% of the job, avoid CSV for non-numeric data and use SQLite instead, when possible, the god-send of Knime, etc.