Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the DAISY (Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Systems) students, who were the first students this course was taught to. Many aspects of the course, from conception to typos, have been revised due to their reactions, their comments and feedback.

This course has also been taught to master media-informatics students. They, too, greatly helped to test and evaluate, to improve and revise the presented course material and topics.

Special thanks go to David Sokalski who teaches this course with me, evaluates the live coding materials and helps with feedback and great suggestions.

This book would not have been possible without the Netherlands eScience Center, an outstanding place to work on research software, but also an highly idealistic bunch of people dreaming of a better academic world. For some reason, they believed that I could become a good research software engineer and a data scientist despite my very poor programming skills at the time I applied for that job. In the three years I worked there, I learned more than ever before, allowing me to succeed with a career switch towards data science.

Precisely that career switch finally brought me to the Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences (HSD) and the Centre for Digitalization and Digitality (ZDD). Unlike many other places, they fully embraced truly interdisciplinary approaches, which in my case meant they accepted my application even though it did not exactly match a linear academic profile, nor a formal training in informatics.