Foundations for Analytics with Python

Preface

This book is intended for readers who deal with data in spreadsheets on a regular basis, but who have never written a line of code. The opening chapters will get you set up with the Python environment, and teach you how to get the computer to look at data and take simple actions with it. Soon, you’ll learn to do things with data in spreadsheets (CSV files) and databases.

At first this will feel like a step backward, especially if you’re a power user of Excel. Painstakingly telling Python how to loop through every cell in a column when you used to select and paste feels slow and frustrating (especially when you have to go back three times to find a typo). But as you become more proficient, you’ll start to see where Python really shines, especially in automating tasks that you currently do over and over.

This book is written so that you can work through it from beginning to end and feel confident that you can write code that works and does what you expect at the end. It’s probably a good idea to type out the code at first, so that you get accustomed to things like tabs and closing your parentheses and quotes, but all the code is available online and you may wind up referring to those links to copy and paste as you do your own work in the future. That’s fine! Knowing when to cut and paste is part of being an efficient programmer. Reading the book as you go through the examples will teach you why and how the code samples work.

Good luck on your journey to becoming a programmer! ...