Last summer, I took a cheese-making class at a local cooking school. One of the first things we made was ricotta cheese. I was thrilled to learn that ricotta can be made in about an hour using just milk and buttermilk, and that buttermilk itself can be made from milk and lemon juice. In a kitchen, ingredients are constantly transformed into other ingredients, which will in turn be transformed into delicious meals. In our data science kitchen, we will routinely perform conversions from one data format to another. We might need to do this in order to perform various analyses, when we want to merge datasets together, or if we need to store a dataset in a new way.

A lingua franca is a language that is adopted as a common standard in a conversation between speakers of different languages. In converting data, there are several data formats that can serve as a common standard. We covered some of these in Chapter 2, Fundamentals – Formats,...