Thinking in LINQ: Harnessing the power of functional programing in .NET applications

CHAPTER 8

Exploratory Data Analysis

Generalization is an extremely powerful concept when applied correctly. For example, in MATLAB even the most trivial addition is performed as a matrix addition. Data comes in many formats. Mostly these formats are not ready for analysis, so programmers, researchers, and data scientists often need to write a lot of data-wrangling code to get the data into a useful form. However, LINQ has changed the way programmers interact with data. LINQ works on the generalization that data is a list—of something. For example, you can think of a database table as a list of rows, an XML file as a list of nodes, a CSV file ...