I first became interested in data journalism while I was a reporter at New Scientist.

I had some experience with computer science, but did not know where to begin. After experimenting with different classes, books and tools, I was able to make the leap to a full-time job in data journalism.

This is in no way meant to be an exhaustive list. It's simply a record of the resources that I found useful.

Updated 5/21/2020

• Gary Price's research tipsheet from NICAR 2019
• Tabula lets you grab data tables from pdfs
• DataThief is a program to extract data points from a graph
• Awesome Public Datasets
• Journalist's Toolbox

• How to 'interview' a big pile of data, from David Eads at NPR
• The Quartz guide to bad data
• Open Learning Initiative's introductory course on probability and statistics
• Databasic.io
• OLI Introduction to Statistics

• Excel Magic with Mary Jo Webster
• The New York Times's data training program.

• Checkio
• Leetcode
• Datacamp
• Swirl for R
• Scott Murray's Interactive Data Visualization for the Web, for d3
• Coursera for command line, git and SQL
• The SQL Murder Mystery
• Ben Welsh's First News App
• Darius Kazemi's guide to making a Twitter bot

• "Data Visualization: basic principles" from Peter Aldhous
• Datawrapper
• Sarah Ryley's NICAR tipsheet for Tableau
• Knightlab Storytelling tools
• Financial Times' "Visual Vocabulary"
• Lena Groeger's guide to making gifs

• How to Lie With Maps by Mark Monmonier
• Show Me the Numbers by Stephen Few
• A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper by John Allen Paulos
• Numbers in the Newsroom by Sarah Cohen
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte
• Visualize This by Nathan Yau
• The Functional Art by Alberto Cairo
• The Science Writer's Investigative Reporting Handbook by Liza Gross

• OpenNews Source
• FlowingData
• Junk Charts
• The Economist's blog on Medium
• Hacks/Hackers
• Tools for Reporters
• Data is Plural
• Data Science Community Newsletter
• Lonely Coders' Club
• Muckrock
• News Nerdery
• NICAR-L

***

A few other thoughts:

Spreadsheets are powerful. They're a good place to start, particularly if you don't know how to code.

If you can, go to a NICAR conference -- or check out the tipsheets from past conferences.

It helps to have a project in mind. Even if you just want to try recreating what someone else has built. Learning indiscriminately can be overwhelming.

You don't need to know every language, tool, etc. Get really good at one or two that are relevant to you, and branch out from there.