Welcome to Learning pandas! In this book, we will go on a journey that will see us learning pandas, an open source data analysis library for the Python programming language. The pandas library provides high-performance and easy-to-use data structures and analysis tools built with Python. pandas brings to Python many good things from the statistical programming language R, specifically data frame objects and R packages such as plyr and reshape2, and places them in a single library that you can use from within Python.
In this first chapter, we will take the time to understand pandas and how it fits into the bigger picture of data analysis. This will give the reader who is interested in pandas a feeling for its place ...
