Learn Algolia, Nginx and Python

Today’s users expect great things from their search experiences — speed, relevance, and usability, to name a few. Algolia provides developers with out-of-the-box and customizable search experiences that are a joy to build.

This introductory course on the Algolia search solution focuses on the user-facing part of search. Using the Algolia InstantSearch.js front-end library, we’ll see how to build an engaging search experience in no time. (28 minutes, to be exact.) 

**Prerequisites:** 
You don’t need previous experience with search to follow this course — we’ll use an example index with an e-commerce data set preconfigured. We will work mainly in JavaScript, so basic JS knowledge is expected.

If you want to play with your own index settings and data set, you can [create a free Algolia account here](https://www.algolia.com/users/sign_up/hacker/?utm_medium=link&utm_source=egghead&utm_campaign=education), but this is not required to follow along with this first course. 

Algolia's full suite APIs enable teams to develop unique search and discovery experiences for their customers across all platforms and devices. Type a query. Click a link. Open an app. Everything your customers do sends a signal about what they want. Algolia decodes that intent to deliver the right content - instantly.

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Getting Started with Algolia InstantSearch.js

Neural networks, with Keras, bring powerful machine learning to Python applications. They can answer questions like “How much traffic will hit my website tonight?” or answer classification questions like “Will this customer buy our product?” or “Will the stock price go up or down tomorrow?”

In this course, we’ll build a fully connected neural network with Keras. This is the most basic type of neural network you can create, but it’s powerful in application and can jumpstart your exploration of other frameworks. 

We’ll start the course by creating the primary network. Then we’ll:

- build and configure the network, then evaluate and test the accuracy of each
- save the model and learn how to load it and use it to make predictions in the future
- expose the model as part of a tiny web application that can be used to make predictions

You don’t need to know a lot of Python for this course, but some basic Python knowledge will be helpful. Enjoy!

Python is a widely used dynamically typed programming language. It allows for many different programming paradigms including object-oriented, imperative, functional programming, and procedural styles.

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Fully Connected Neural Networks with Keras

In Introduction to Python, we will start at the beginning: Installing python 3 and using virtual environments. With a working environment, we will learn how to manipulate strings and numbers, and gain working knowledge of data structures and flow control. We will build on that by introducing modules and classes and learn how to interact with our python applications using command line switches, console input and files.

At the end of this course, you’ll have a great working knowledge of Python, fully capable of creating your own Python projects from scratch or jumping into an existing application with the capability to read, understand, and contribute to the application.

Check out these [**community notes for this course on Github**](https://github.com/eggheadio-projects/introduction-to-the-python-3-programming-language-notes).

Introduction to the Python 3 Programming Language

Artificial intelligence. Machine learning. Bots. Computers learning and communicating with us to do our bidding. But, where do you start? How do you get a machine to even begin to understand what you speak or type at it? There are several common machine learning algorithms that will help us begin to answer these questions.

In this course we’ll learn about common machine learning algorithms that don’t require implementing a neural network. We will not be going too much into the math behind them, but instead learn what each algorithm is good for, and how to train them. We'll also learn about a few metrics for evaluating models.

We’ll implement these in Python using `scikit-learn` using `scikit-learn`’s built-in data sets. The focus of this course is on implementation and a high-level understanding of these algorithms. 

We'll look at a few ways to evaluate our models, for both classification and regression models. We'll touch on mean squared error and coefficient of determination (for regression), and accuracy score, logarithmic loss, confusion matrices, and classification reports (for classification). 

Python 2.7 is used in the lesson videos but the code provided has Python 3 available. The only breaking change is the `print` statement API.

For additional information on installation, vocabulary, and common errors visit the `README.md` to the course code attached to each lesson.

Simple and efficient tools for data mining and data analysis

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Introductory Machine Learning Algorithms in Python with scikit-learn

AWS Amplify allows developers to create, configure, and deploy Serverless APIs and functions directly from their front-end environment.In this collection, you'll learn how to deploy various types of APIs and functions using the Amplify CLI. You'll also learn how to share code among various functions using Lambda layers and schedule functions to run at an interval to implement Serverless cron jobs.

JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

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Up and Running with AWS Amplify Functions

Learn how to create tuples in Python. The videos in this collection will also cover more advanced features of tuples

The Ins and Outs of Python Tuples

The stats widget is used to display useful insights about the current results like the number of hits and the time taken to compute the results inside the engine.

Inform users about the current result set with Instantsearch JS Stats widget

The first step to implement Algolia on the front end using Instantsearch : importing and setting up the library with your credentials. This is what will allow the library to initiate the connection to Algolia servers and the first step to complete before adding some useful widgets.

Set up the Instantsearch JS Library

In this lesson we’ll build a search experience reduced to it’s 2 essential components : a search input and the displayed results. As simple as it is, to build this from scratch would require a fair amount of work. Between listening to the input, making the api call, parsing and displaying the result... To build this using Algolia’s Instantsearch library requires a few lines of code with simply two widgets: the Searchbox and the Hits widget.

Search an Algolia Index with Instantsearch JS searchbox and hits widgets

Displaying barebones Hits won’t catch your user’s attention. The UI is key to provide a good search experience and hits are the meat of this experience so they need extra attention. By using Mustache templating we’ll see how to display rich results to your users. 

Display Rich results with templates in the Hits widget for Instantsearch JS

Every  good search UX make users understand instantly why a given hit is being displayed as part of the result set. One way to achieve that is to highlight the keywords from the query directly inside the Hits. This is built in the API JSON response and in this video we’ll explain how to leverage it easily.

Highlight Keywords in Query Results using the Instantsearch JS Hits Widget

Searching is obviously not limited to inputting text in a searchbox. If your dataset allows it Algolia can leverage of attributes and values. To make use of those facets on the front end, one of the most common widget that you can find in a search UI is the refinement list. With this widget, the user can filter the dataset based on facets. This widget only displays the most relevant facets for the current search context.

Filter Datasets with Facets using Instantsearch JS to add a Refinement List

The hierarchical menu widget is used to create a navigation based on a hierarchy of facet attributes. We generally implement it for categories with subcategories.

Browse results based on a hierarchy of Facets (HierarchicalMenu) in Instantsearch JS

The range input is a simple but useful widget that allows a user filter the results by selecting a numeric range with a minimum and maximum input. In an e-commerce website for instance, this widget would be useful to limit the results where the price is comprised between $X and $Y.

Refine a dataset using a numeric range in Instantsearch JS with the Range Input widget

When performing a complex query, based on several active facets and filters, its tedious for the user to start from scratch if she has to unset all refinements one by one. Thanks to the clearAll widget, this task becomes a one click action for the user and is trivial to implement for us developers as it requires no configuration.

Reset all active refinements with the clearRefinements Instantsearch JS widget

When you have a large result set for a specific query and usually not displaying more than a few dozen simultaneously. Pagination is a popular widget that allows the user to switch between pages of the results.

Paginate Large Sets of Algolia Data with Instantsearch JS Pagination widget

All Instantsearch widgets are added to the page in a similar fashion and they also share a number of common options that we’ll cover in this video. We will be playing with a dummy menu widget that won’t be part of the final project just to showcase all those options.

How to Add Instantsearch JS widgets and their common attributes 

Sometimes you get strings instead of objects and you have to parse them out. Here's an example where the raw data I got from a Twitch chatbot message wasn't useful to me until I parsed it into a dictionary.

Turning a key/value string into a dictionary in Python

In this lesson, you'll learn how to deploy a serverless function using the Python runtime, connect it to an API endpoint, and interact with it from a React application.

Creating a full stack serverless app with Python, React hooks, and AWS Amplify Functions

Using the `open` function, and the `as` and `with` keywords, we'll open up and read from a file. At the end of this lesson, you will be able to loop through the lines of text in a file, process the text in Python, and then print them to the terminal.

Read from a File in Python

Learn how to create a tuple in Python. A tuple is an immutable data type that contains several items similar to a list. Items in a tuple can be of any data type.

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