Anyone got a good practice to become a data scientist?

Is that when I get Bunsen burners out and light USB drives on fire?

@Greggergalactic R lang is the Ruby of data science. R devs have the reputation of being condescending. R is also less flexible than Python....

Ah what am I saying...

To be a data scientist you need to:
A. The Easy way:
Read some guides on how to use sklearn and similar libraries.
B. The Hard way:
Do some Computer Science classes, learn linear algebra, integrals, differential equations... Go to the university basically.

Will there be any difference? Hard to say. With university, you'll understand how things work from the inside, and maybe learn to better understand the algorithms and contribute to this. But you would have missed years of practical experience that you would have gotten with just the speed course.

One step at a time... First become data, then go for the scientist part.

Data science is such a flexible term. Probably because it's really just a buzz word used to describe someone who performs statistical analysis on large amounts of data, and performs some basic machine learning. So step by step:
Learn calculus statistics
Learn linear algebra
Learn python,
Tensorflow
Scikit learn
Pandas
Numpy
Learn R
Finish your CS degree
Get an internship
Eventually transition to a real job

Or if you have no CS degree, spend years and thousands on coding boot camps that will never get you a job. Or just get a degree in CS.

As a note, I don't say this to be an ass. I say this as someone with a masters degree, specialized in machine learning and statistics. It's hard out there. I still can't get a job as a data scientist, because everyone wants really experienced players in that game.

@Greggergalactic several years ago I made a promise - to never become a Ruby developer.
The climate back then was the following:
1. Aggressive "Your language sucks, Ruby is cool" ads kept popping up everywhere.
2. Very good, the best you could say, tool for coding PHP - Aptana Studio, was completely butchered into a piece of crap, just so they would release a Ruby development tool. Actively sabotaging PHP development and promoting Ruby development.
3. The people. I've never met a crowd of more hipstery obnoxious condescending people than Ruby developers at dev offline hangouts that I've visited. The stereotypical hipster - beard, checkered unbuttoned shirt, 10 year old dirty ThinkPad or mac, with vi, telling everybody how Ruby is the best conceivable language, even though they never worked with anything else.

I didn't want any part of that.

I'm not socially active in dev circles any more (new country), but now my colleagues tell me it's the same with R vs Python data science devs.

@Greggergalactic yeah, I get you, and I don't claim to have a rational platform on this one. It's my personal preference. And I illustrated all I know about the reason why R is also viewed this way.

Ruby as a language has declined in usage, and doesn't innovate much. I am definitely not sorry that I ignored it, and am actually happy that it is going away.