A few years ago, I received a very interesting present at my family's annual holiday gift exchange. It was a garde manger kitchen toolset that included a bunch of different knives as well as peelers, scoops, and zesters used to prepare vegetables and fruits. I learned to use each of the tools, and over time, I developed a special fondness for the channel knife and the tomato shark. This chapter is like your introductory data cleaning toolset. We will review:
File formats, including compression standards
The fundamentals of data types (including different types of missing data)
Character encodings
We will need all these fundamentals as we progress to later chapters. Some of the concepts that we'll cover are so basic that you'll encounter them nearly every day, such as compression and file formats. These are so common; they are like a chef's knife. But some of these concepts, like character encodings, are more special-purpose and exotic,...