Book Image

Practical Data Wrangling

By : Allan Visochek
Book Image

Practical Data Wrangling

By: Allan Visochek

Overview of this book

Around 80% of time in data analysis is spent on cleaning and preparing data for analysis. This is, however, an important task, and is a prerequisite to the rest of the data analysis workflow, including visualization, analysis and reporting. Python and R are considered a popular choice of tool for data analysis, and have packages that can be best used to manipulate different kinds of data, as per your requirements. This book will show you the different data wrangling techniques, and how you can leverage the power of Python and R packages to implement them. You’ll start by understanding the data wrangling process and get a solid foundation to work with different types of data. You’ll work with different data structures and acquire and parse data from various locations. You’ll also see how to reshape the layout of data and manipulate, summarize, and join data sets. Finally, we conclude with a quick primer on accessing and processing data from databases, conducting data exploration, and storing and retrieving data quickly using databases. The book includes practical examples on each of these points using simple and real-world data sets to give you an easier understanding. By the end of the book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of all the data wrangling concepts and how to implement them in the best possible way.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Data types, variables, and the Python shell


In the next few sections, I will use a tool called the Python shell, which will help you get more comfortable using Python. The Python shell is a tool that allows the user to enter in Python commands, which get run instantaneously. This makes the Python shell a great place to quickly and easily experiment with small bits of code or new functionality in Python.

Note

There is no easy way of saving the code that is entered in the Python shell, so it is best to use it only for experimentation.

You can run the Python shell from a Terminal. To do this, open a Terminal and, from any directory, enter one of the following depending on your configuration:

$ Python
$ python3

You should see a new command prompt within the Terminal that looks something like this:

In Python, a single instruction is called a simple statement. For now, each individual line of code represents a simple statement. The Python shell will accept one line of code at a time. The following is...