Where possible, the examples in this chapter will utilize several datasets provided with the code in the download for the text. These datasets make the examples a little less academic in nature. These datasets will be read from files using the pd.read_csv() function that will load the sample data from the file into a DataFrame object.

The remainder of the samples will still utilize the DataFrame objects created on demand if they demonstrate the concept being examined in a better way. Let's see the brief descriptions of these datasets.

In [13]:
   # show the first three lines of the file
   !head -n 3 data/sp500.csv # on Mac or Linux
   # !type data\sp500.csv # on Windows, but...