Microsoft’s New Free Video Course for Aspiring Programmers to Learn Python and Build AI Applications on Azure.

Microsoft has launched a new 44-part video series called Python for Beginners on Youtube. The series contains 3-4 minutes lessons taught by two Microsoft programmers.

The lesson is presented by Christopher Harrison (@GeekTrainer), a senior program manager at Microsoft together with business development manager, Susan Ibach (@HockeyGeekGirl) from the Microsoft AI Gaming Unit.

The course is targeting intermediate and expert programmers as it assumes that the student have basic/beginners knowledge on programming using JavaScript language or have already worked with the MIT Scratch programming language for kids.

The course helps one to learn and be able to build a machine-learning applications, a webApp, or an automation process for Desktop use. The course provides a quick start tutorial on how ro detect human faces in an image using the Azure Face API and Python Language. Another course tutorial shows how you can use Computer Vision REST API as part of the Microsoft Cognitive Services.

Additionally, Microsoft has publishes a GitHub repository that contains all the required resources to learn. The resources comes with code and slides for learning samples.

What you’ll learn include:

The basics of Python
Starting a project
Common syntax
Package management

What will NOT be covered include:

Class design and inheritance
Asynchronous programming
Basics of programming

The reason why Python is becoming more popular is because it is easy to learn, has plenty of libraries available making it easy to interface with machine learning frameworks like the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) and the Google TensorFlow.

In addition to that, Microsoft owns a Python extension for visual Studio Code (VS Code) and is currently the most popular extension in the Company’s marketplace for developers with 54.9 million downloads followed by Gitlens with 23.1 million downloads. And as part of Microsoft’s focus on AI, VS Code has been made available as part of the popular Anaconda Python distribution.

Microsoft has also expanded the use of Azure for building AI applications using Python. There is available support for Python in Azure Machine Learning Studio that was announced in August 2019 a full Azure Machine Learning support for PyTorch 1.2, a machine learning framework for Python from Facebook AI research group.