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

Summary


In this chapter, we learned what the term data wrangling means. We also got examples from various real-life data science situations where data wrangling is very useful and is used in industry. We moved on to learn about the different built-in data structures that Python has to offer. We got our hands dirty by exploring lists, sets, dictionaries, tuples, and strings. They are the fundamental building blocks in Python data structures, and we need them all the time while working and manipulating data in Python. We did several small hands-on exercises to learn more about them. We finished this chapter with a carefully designed activity, which let us combine a lot of different tricks from all the different data structures into a real-life situation and let us observe the interplay between all of them.

In the next chapter, we will learn about the data structures in Python and utilize them to solve real-world problems.