Would recommend

Introduction to Python Programming for Business and Social Science Applications

This book uses real-world examples to demonstrate how to use python code for predictive analytics. It also goes over a lot of other tools that are part of predictive analytics, including html, how to obtain data, and data visualization. There is a lot of information to digest in this book; it is not an easy read necessarily, but it gives a lot of in-depth information on the broad topic of predictive analytics.

This book dives further into the code than other books I’ve come across on this subject, which I really appreciated. I didn’t follow along with the examples it gave verbatim, but skimming the material gave me the impression that this book could be useful to bridge the gap between theory and practicality. Overall, I plan to return to this book one day, as it has a lot of potential to be a book that would elevate my skillset in Python coding for predictive analytics.

Excel VBA Programming for Dummies

This book was a great introduction to the world of macros, and it gave me a solid foundation to build on. This book contains many helpful building blocks for writing VBA code, and I have referred back to the book many times for its well-formatted examples.

Excel 2016 VBA and Macros

This is an extensive and specific book, which is definitely geared towards those people with a solid understanding of VBA code already. It is less of a walkthrough book and is more of a comprehensive resource aimed at giving answers to any question someone may have about VBA coding. That being said, I found this to be an excellent book to enhance my VBA knowledge. I read it cover-to-cover, but it would have also been helpful if I was just looking for a specific example and searched the table of contents.

Take it or leave it

Predictive Analytics for Dummies

Because I was looking for more information on how predictive analytics is done, I was a little disappointed by this book. That being said, it did have good information about what it did cover, which mainly involved convincing people that they need predictive analytics. Surprisingly, my predictive analytics professor had a similar sentiment. The few examples it gave were insightful, but there wasn’t much else that made this book worth reading. Overall, I would recommend this book to someone who may be an expert in predictive analytics and is looking for something to do with that skillset, not really someone looking to build the skills.

Data Visualization for Dummies

This book didn’t wow me, but it was perfectly fine to flip through. If I were to have a role that involved a lot more data visualization I may revisit this book, although it is unlikely. I didn’t really take away anything meaningful from this book, apart from the idea that there are many different options out there to explore, and different data may need to be displayed creatively in order to get the maximum understanding by those interacting with it.