Numerical Computing with Python

How it works...

The values in a Series are referenced by integers beginning from 0. Step 2 selects the fourth element of the Series with the .loc indexer. Step 3 passes a three-item integer list to the indexing operator, which returns a Series with those integer locations selected. This feature is an enhancement over a Python list, which is incapable of selecting multiple disjoint items in this manner.

In step 4, slice notation with start, stop, and step values specified is used to select an entire section of a Series.

Steps 5 through 7 replicate steps 2 through 4 with the label-based indexer, .loc.  The labels must be exact matches of values in the index. To ensure our labels are exact, we choose four labels at random from the index in step ...