In this blog you will learn - How to get Google cloud certification? How much it cost to get Google certified? Best Google certification courses available online right now. How to train yourself with Google cloud certification practice exams before actual examination.

Before we begin I would like to mention one fact, you can crack this exam even if you don’t have "any work experience or prior knowledge" of GCP (Google Cloud Platform).

I am writing this blog to showcase how you can clear Google cloud professional data engineer certification without any prior knowledge of GCP. I would start by dividing this whole preparation into 3 basic sections:

1. Online video lectures (absolutely free if completed within a time frame)

2. Glance through some Google documentation

3. Finally, few practice tests

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Step 1. Online Video Lectures

Coursera: First begin with Coursera course which is also suggested by google and it's really knowledgeable. You can use 7 day free trial of coursera to complete this specialization. But since this is very big course, you will have to devote good amount of time everyday for these 7 days.

This course comes with Qwiklabs where you can do lab assessments without creating any GCP account. Also this course comes with quizzes so as to get good understanding of GCP components with hands-on experience as well.

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Udemy: Next comes Udemy, it's a combined course for both data engineers and architects. This course will help you to understand real world implementation of GCP components. You can skip machine learning part from this course if you want.

These two courses are not very exam oriented but will give you good understanding of every GCP component with some basic hands on.

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Now jumping to exam oriented video lectures, Cloud Academy and Linux Academy comes to our rescue.

Both of these sites comes with a 7 days free trial option.

• Cloud Academy will give you good knowledge of most of the topics covered in the exam. You can learn machine learning from this course. Try to understand well each and every point covered in this course. This course also comes with quizzes for main topics. Understand well the explanations given for the quizzes. However this Cloud Academy course doesn’t cover topics such as data preparation and this is where linux academy comes into the picture.

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• Linux Academy course has covered all the topics of the exam in most exam oriented way. You will get good understanding of machine learning and other remaining topics. This course also has topic wise tests and a full 2 hour test (50 questions) to give you a feel of real test. However I would recommend you to give this test at the last stage of preparation and also attempt this test at least thrice and score 100%.

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For revision I would suggest you to go through Linux academy’s Data Dossier. This is the best part of complete course which you will require at the last moment.

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Step 2: Google Documentation

There are few topics such as big-query, pub-sub, data-studio for which you will have to go through google docs. For data flow you need to go through apache beam documentation. Understand following points of each of the components very well:

• Access Control

• Best practices

• Limitations

For ML, understand well the different use cases where pre-trained ML apis are used. This will help you understand whether to use pre-build apis or to make a custom model.

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Step 3: Practice Test

For practice tests you can go through the following:

• Google DE practice test

• Whizlabs Test

• Linux academy practice test

Make sure you give all the tests at least thrice and understand well, each question and their answers. For each of the question you should understand why a particular answer is correct and why the remaining ones are incorrect.

At the end I would suggest that google has made this exam very logical where in you need to know the in and out of every topic very well to clear the exam. So understand everything well and don’t try to memorize or mug up everything.

Best of luck!!