October 2017
Beginner to intermediate
547 pages
12h 16m
English
Content preview from Python for Data Analysis, 2nd EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 1. Preliminaries
1.1 What Is This Book About?
This book is concerned with the nuts and bolts of manipulating, processing, cleaning, and crunching data in Python. My goal is to offer a guide to the parts of the Python programming language and its data-oriented library ecosystem and tools that will equip you to become an effective data analyst. While “data analysis” is in the title of the book, the focus is specifically on Python programming, libraries, and tools as opposed to data analysis methodology. This is the Python programming you need for data analysis.
What Kinds of Data?
When I say “data,” what am I referring to exactly? The primary focus is on structured data, a deliberately vague term that encompasses many different common forms of data, such as:
Tabular or spreadsheet-like data in which each column may be a different type (string, numeric, date, or otherwise). This includes most kinds of data commonly stored in relational databases or tab- or comma-delimited text files.
Multidimensional arrays (matrices).
Multiple tables of data interrelated by key columns (what would be primary or foreign keys for a SQL user).
Evenly or unevenly spaced time series.
This is by no means a complete list. Even though it may not always be obvious, a large percentage of datasets can be transformed into a structured form that is more suitable for analysis and modeling. If not, it may be possible to extract features from a dataset into a structured form. As an example, a collection of news articles ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.