Book Image

Data Wrangling with Python

By : Dr. Tirthajyoti Sarkar, Shubhadeep Roychowdhury
Book Image

Data Wrangling with Python

By: Dr. Tirthajyoti Sarkar, Shubhadeep Roychowdhury

Overview of this book

For data to be useful and meaningful, it must be curated and refined. Data Wrangling with Python teaches you the core ideas behind these processes and equips you with knowledge of the most popular tools and techniques in the domain. The book starts with the absolute basics of Python, focusing mainly on data structures. It then delves into the fundamental tools of data wrangling like NumPy and Pandas libraries. You'll explore useful insights into why you should stay away from traditional ways of data cleaning, as done in other languages, and take advantage of the specialized pre-built routines in Python. This combination of Python tips and tricks will also demonstrate how to use the same Python backend and extract/transform data from an array of sources including the Internet, large database vaults, and Excel financial tables. To help you prepare for more challenging scenarios, you'll cover how to handle missing or wrong data, and reformat it based on the requirements from the downstream analytics tool. The book will further help you grasp concepts through real-world examples and datasets. By the end of this book, you will be confident in using a diverse array of sources to extract, clean, transform, and format your data efficiently.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Data Wrangling with Python
Preface
Appendix

Reading Data from an API


Fundamentally, an API or Application Programming Interface is some kind of interface to a computing resource (for example, an operating system or database table), which has a set of exposed methods (function calls) that allow a programmer to access particular data or internal features of that resource.

A web API is, as the name suggests, an API over the web. Note that it is not a specific technology or programming framework, but an architectural concept. Think of an API like a fast food restaurant's customer service center. Internally, there are many food items, raw materials, cooking resources, and recipe management systems, but all you see are fixed menu items on the board and you can only interact through those items. It is like a port that can be accessed using an HTTP protocol and is able to deliver data and services if used properly.

Web APIs are extremely popular these days for all kinds of data services. In the very first chapter, we talked about how UC San...