Appendix C. NumPy crash course
The open source NumPy (Numerical Python) library is a dependency of pandas that exposes a powerful ndarray object for storing homogeneous, n-dimensional arrays. That’s quite a mouthful, so let’s break it down. An array is an ordered collection of values akin to a Python list. Homogeneous means that the values within the array are of the same data type. N-dimensional means that the array can hold any number of dimensions. (We’ll talk about dimensions in section C.1.) NumPy was developed by data scientist Travis Oliphant, who founded Anaconda, the company that builds the Python distribution we used to set up our development environment.
We can use NumPy to generate randomized data sets of any size and shape; in ...
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