According to a statistical study performed by The Mercury News earlier this year, the San Francisco Bay Area boasted 831,700 tech jobs at the end of last April. This overwhelming number exceeds that of the dot-com peak of 2000, when the number capped out at 718,700 jobs. Evidently, San Francisco is witnessing a greater increase in tech jobs than ever before, inspiring local job seekers to learn new skills as more and more opportunities become available.
Among the thousands of tech job openings swarming San Francisco are those requiring coding experience. Compared to some of the most popular programming languages, Python still ranks at the top of the list. In the Bay Area alone, there are numerous schools that specialize in Python training, offering both flexible, online classes and immersive, in-person bootcamps. For San Francisco, those wishing to strengthen their skillsets, these 11 Python courses will give you the coding knowledge you need to keep up with the competitive San Francisco tech scene.
11 Popular Python Courses in San Francisco Bay Area
- AcademyX
- Certstaffix Training
- Coding Dojo
- Dataquest
- Galvanize
- General Assembly
- Hackbright Academy
- Kickstart Coding
- ONLC Training Centers
- Rithm School
- Zero to Deep Learning
Location: Financial District
Course overview: AcademyX offers both a Python training course for beginners, as well as one for advanced learners, both of which can be taken at their San Francisco location. The 18-hour Python training course for beginners covers a variety of topics, including the fundamentals of Python, functions, sequences, control statements, repetition control statements, list processing, sets and dictionaries and object-oriented programming. Students will walk away from the course knowing how to write their own Python programs with custom functions. During the 12-hour advanced Python training course, students build upon their Python knowledge, covering programming idioms, functional programming, unit testing, network programming and more. Upon completion of the advanced course, students should know how to write sophisticated Python applications to retrieve, process and visualize data.
Pricing: $1,800 for the 18-hour course and $1,395 for the 12-hour course.
Location: Oakland, Greater San Francisco Bay Area
Course overview: Certstaffix Training provides in-person introductory and advanced Python training courses. Geared towards beginners, the four-day Introduction to Python Programming course covers a wide range of topics, such as how to work with and manipulate strings, work with sequences, collect user input and output results and handle exceptions. During the two-day Advanced Python Programming course, students learn a variety of techniques to build upon their Python education, including mapping and filtering, lambda functions, working with regular expressions, writing object-oriented code and testing and debugging.
Pricing: $2,700 for the introductory course and $1,350 for the advanced course.
Location: Oakland, Greater San Francisco Bay Area
Course overview: Coding Dojo offers an in-person, four-month coding bootcamp at its Oakland location and focuses heavily on Python. The program provides extensive coverage of Python, covering topics like SQL queries and ERD diagrams, web security basics, CRUD operations, MVC framework and design patterns, application deployment and algorithms in Python. The technologies covered during the Python portion of the course include MySQL, Flask, Ajax, APIs and Django. For those who prefer a remote option, Coding Dojo offers a part-time, online Python training course, which covers the same material as the bootcamp.
Pricing: $14,495 for the in-person bootcamp and $9,995 for the part-time, online course.
Location: Online
Course overview: Dataquest offers a variety of online Python courses, geared towards both beginners and advanced learners. In the Python for Data Science: Fundamentals course, students learn how to code using real-world mobile app data while learning key Python concepts. The Pandas and NumPy Fundamentals course covers various skills, such as understanding how vectorized operations make working with data faster and selecting data by value using boolean indexing.
Pricing: Packages start at $29 per month.
Location: Rincon Hill
Course overview: At its San Francisco campus, Galvanize offers a 13-week, immersive data science bootcamp with a Python-based curriculum, as well as a six-week, part-time Python fundamentals course. The bootcamp covers Python and statistics fundamentals, machine learning and prediction, including regression and clustering, and natural language processing and recommenders. Students work on three “capstone projects” throughout the program, as well as several group case studies. Geared towards beginners, the part-time course covers the building blocks of Python, starting with fundamental concepts before diving into object-oriented programming and data science libraries, such as Matplotlib, Pandas, NumPy and Sklearn.
Pricing: $17,980 for the bootcamp and $750 for the part-time course.
Location: Financial District
Course overview: General Assembly provides a four-month, immersive data science bootcamp with a focus on Python, as well as a 10-week, part-time Python programming course, both of which are held at its San Francisco campus. Besides the Python language, the bootcamp covers data mining, statistical modeling, machine learning, recommender systems, neural networks and computer vision models. The part-time course begins with Python and programming fundamentals and then dives into other aspects of Python, such as boolean conditionals, list operations, function arguments, object-oriented programming, dictionaries, variable scope and debugging principles and techniques.
Pricing: $15,950 for the bootcamp and $3,950 for the part-time course.
Location: Online
Course overview: Hackbright Academy offers an online Python 101 course, which gives students a solid programming foundation and fulfills the 40-hour coding requirement for their Software Engineering program. Throughout the course, students learn a wide range of topics, including data structures, Python tools, control flow, conditionals, loops, lists and dictionaries. Students should walk away from the course with debugging skills and error types, as well as proficiency in translating real-world problems into computer programs. The course is self-paced and comprised of weekly modules and assignments.
Pricing: $695
Location: Oakland, Greater San Francisco Bay Area
Course overview: Kickstart Coding offers an eight-week Python course, which can be taken in conjunction with an eight-week React course. The 16-week, combined full-stack course covers a variety of subjects relating to Python, including Django, APIs, ORM, templating, static sites, single page apps and algorithms. The program is designed to make students think like software engineers, incorporating hands-on, real-world projects to prepare students for a full-stack position. Classes are held during the evening and a dev laptop is included in the program as part of Kickstart’s “Laptop Scholarship.”
Pricing: $2,500 for the eight-week Python course and $3,700 for the combined full-stack course.
Location: Financial District
Course overview: ONLC Training Centers offers a wide selection of Python training courses at its San Francisco location, which vary in scope and experience. In the introductory Python programming course, students learn a variety of skills, including how to recognize source code for a console application, use the interactive shell, manage source files and use relational and logical operators. Geared towards experienced Python programmers, the Python Data Analysis NumPy and Pandas course covers more advanced topics, such as Jupyter Notebook modes, NumPy arrays compared to Python lists, random sampling and boolean selection. During the Advanced Python 3 Programming course, students build upon their previous Python experience, covering topics like advanced sorting, lambdas, databases, CSV files and writing object-oriented code.
Pricing: $995-$1,495
Location: Online
Course overview: For those looking for a remote, affordable training option, Rithm School offers two, free online Python courses, which cover fundamental topics. In the Python Fundamentals I course, students learn a variety of concepts, including variables and data types, boolean logic, dictionary iteration and comprehension, function parameters and modules. The Python Fundamentals II course covers a wide range of Python topics, such as object-oriented programming, inheritance and MRO, file I/O with CSVs, generators and iterators, lambdas and dates and web scraping.
Pricing: Free
Location: Tenderloin / SoMa
Course overview: Zero to Deep Learning offers an in-person, five-day bootcamp, which covers various aspects of machine learning and deep learning. Throughout the course, students will learn a variety of skills, such as how to forecast numbers with regressions, build fully connected networks, demystify convolutions for images, tune hyper-params with grid search and design sequential and functional models. Throughout the course, students test their knowledge by writing code for real-world problems and useful applications, covering topics like how to predict house prices and survival rates, forecast energy consumption and detect language and cluster customers.
Pricing: $3,200-$7,000
