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How to Learn Data Science & AI with KNIME Cheat Sheets
Improve your KNIME proficiency with cheat sheets organized by learning level, profession, and specialization
Some people learn best from books, some people learn best from video playlists, some people learn best from structured courses. One lesson after the next, one book chapter after the next, one video after the next. And then there are other people who have less time to dedicate to structured learning and who want to see how something works immediately.
For those people who like to get straight to the answers, we’ve put together a collection of KNIME cheat sheets to help you quickly upskill on KNIME Analytics Platform.
In this blog, we’ll give a comprehensive overview of all the cheat sheets available to you for free at KNIME, according to learning level, type of data profession, and specialization. You can find all KNIME cheat sheets on the KNIME Press page.
Cheat sheets by learning level
There are four levels of accomplishment in the KNIME Learning Center course progression:
- L1: Basic knowledge of KNIME Analytics Platform
- L2: Advanced knowledge of KNIME Analytics Platform
- L3: Productionization with KNIME Business Hub
- L4: Specialization in various Data Science fields.
With the recent addition of the cheat sheet “Browse and Collaborate on KNIME Business Hub” and “Deployment on KNIME Business Hub”, we have now cheat sheets for all levels of learning, courses, and certifications.
L1: Basics
These courses and certifications teach and certify respectively about the basic knowledge of KNIME Analytics Platform, needed to create simple data science and AI applications. To support that, you can refer to the following cheat sheets.
- “Building a KNIME Workflow for Beginners” describes the basic notions required to build a beginners general workflow: data access from file, data exploration, some data transformation operations, some machine learning concepts, and concluding with data export as file, report, or dashboard.
- “Data Wrangling” is a “must” cheat sheet for beginners in data engineering. It covers all basic operations to access, clean, transform, and store data.
- “Alteryx to KNIME” and “KNIME Analytics Platform for Spreadsheet Users” will teach you how to move the first steps into KNIME Analytics Platform, with references from the spreadsheet or the Alteryx world. Nodes may not correspond 1:1, but a clean migration is always possible.
L2: Advanced
These courses introduce a further level of complexity and abstraction into the workflows. The cheat sheets suitable for this learning level are:
- “Control and Orchestration”. A good part of this cheat sheet is dedicated to control operations, like flow variables for workflow parameterization, loops, and switches, as well as remote calls to external workflows and the related data passing.
- “Components”. Components are not only useful to hide the complexity, but also and foremost to display complex visualizations in interactive dashboards. This cheat sheet lists common nodes and features used to tell a compelling visual story with your data.
If you are working within an enterprise, at some point you will need to step up your game. Sure, you can still create as many workflows as you want, as powerful and elegant as you can, but at some point, you will need to test them and put them into production to work for real. To do so, you will need to collaborate with your colleagues, and you will need a productionization environment to regulate access to data and applications.
L3: Productionization
These courses and certifications deal with these productionization and collaboration issues, especially with best practices that help you make the process as smooth as possible. There are two cheat sheets to recommend here:
- “Browse and Collaborate” focuses on teams and spaces, two essential features to share your work and to work together as a team.
- “Deployment”. The real professionals you recognize them in production. Creating a new application is easy. Making it function, scale, and operational 100% of the time is the real challenge. This cheat sheet explores those functionalities of KNIME Business Hub that can help you solve this challenge.
L4: Specialization
These courses make you an expert in your field. Be it data engineering, data analysis, or data science, these cheat sheets equip you with the right theoretical and/or best practice knowledge to be among the most competent professionals out there. Each specialization has its own cheat sheet.
- “ Machine Learning ” is designed for Data Scientists and summarizes the most commonly used machine learning and statistics based algorithms.
- “GenAI” is the last produced cheat sheet following the great request of integrating GenAI, LLMs, RAG, and Agents within KNIME workflows.
- “Connectors” explores a subset of common data sources and their KNIME connectors, that all Data Engineers should know.
- “Data Visualization”, “KNIME for Finance Departments”, and “Geospatial Analytics” summarize mandatory topics for data analysts.
Cheat Sheets by data profession
Let’s take a look at things from another perspective. If I want to become a data engineer, which cheat sheet can help me? Indeed, the learning paths by the KNIME Learning Center are not organized just by proficiency level but also by profession. KNIME Learning Center has learning paths for data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists. That’s why we have produced a series of cheat sheets for these three professional paths.
Data Analysts:
- Start with “Alteryx to KNIME” or “KNIME Analytics Platform for Spreadsheet Users”. Data analysts are often already familiar with spreadsheets or with other software. That’s why it is best to start with a transition cheat sheet.
- Then progress with “Control and Orchestration” and “Components” cheat sheets. These two cheat sheets help all users to move to the next level of expertise.
- After that comes production. This part is summarized in the “Browse and Collaborate” and “Deployment” cheat sheets. These are two other cheat sheets valid for all data professionals.
- Finally, specialize with “Data Visualization”, “KNIME for Finance Departments”, or “Geospatial Analytics”.
Data Engineers:
- “Data Wrangling”. Data engineering is the art of moving data from A to B. Let’s start your education in this field with the basic data wrangling operations.
- “Control and Orchestration” and “Components”.
- “Browse and Collaborate” and “Deployment”.
- “Connectors”. Just to underline the data-centrality in data engineering operations, this learning path concludes with a summary of common data sources and their connectors.
Data Scientists:
- “Building a KNIME Workflow for Beginners”. Let’s begin with the generic cheat sheet for beginners.
- “Control and Orchestration” and “Components”.
- “Browse and Collaborate” and “Deployment”.
- “Machine Learning” and “GenAI”. Let’s conclude with what data scientists should know best: machine learning and statistics based algorithms. And now also GenAI, LLMs, RAG, Agents, ect!
Learn data science and AI one cheat sheet at a time
If you are one of those people who cannot listen to lectures or if you just need a reminder from time to time of the most frequent features and nodes, then the KNIME cheat sheets are for you!
Make sure to bookmark them in your browser for easy access next time you’re using KNIME Analytics Platform. Or consider downloading them and sending them to your team-mates to upskill together!
All cheat sheets are available for free from the KNIME Press.
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As previously published on the KNIME Blog: https://www.knime.com/blog/knime-cheat-sheets
