Book Image

Practical Data Science Cookbook

By : Tony Ojeda, Sean Patrick Murphy, Benjamin Bengfort, Abhijit Dasgupta
Book Image

Practical Data Science Cookbook

By: Tony Ojeda, Sean Patrick Murphy, Benjamin Bengfort, Abhijit Dasgupta

Overview of this book

<p>As increasing amounts of data is generated each year, the need to analyze and operationalize it is more important than ever. Companies that know what to do with their data will have a competitive advantage over companies that don't, and this will drive a higher demand for knowledgeable and competent data professionals.</p> <p>Starting with the basics, this book will cover how to set up your numerical programming environment, introduce you to the data science pipeline (an iterative process by which data science projects are completed), and guide you through several data projects in a step-by-step format. By sequentially working through the steps in each chapter, you will quickly familiarize yourself with the process and learn how to apply it to a variety of situations with examples in the two most popular programming languages for data analysis—R and Python.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Practical Data Science Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Getting started with IPython


IPython is the interactive computing shell for Python that will change the way you think about interactive shells. It brings to the table a host of very useful functionalities that will most likely become part of your default toolbox, including magic functions, tab completion, easy access to command-line tools, and much more. We will only scratch the surface here and strongly recommend that you keep exploring what can be done with IPython.

Getting ready

If you have completed the installation instructions in the first chapter, you should be ready to tackle the following recipes. Note that IPython 2.0, which is a major release, was launched in 2014.

How to do it…

The following steps will get you up and running with the IPython environment:

  1. Open up a terminal window on your computer and type ipython. You should be immediately presented with the following text:

    Python 2.7.5 (default, Mar  9 2014, 22:15:05)
    Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information...