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

Introducing APIs


Most communication over the web is done using http protocol, which specifies a set of request/response protocols for exchanging data between a client and a server. The client, which is often a web browser, submits a request for data from the server, and the server sends a response. Typically, the response is an HTML web page. The response, however, can also be data in some text format.

The most popular types of requests are get requests and post requests. In this chapter, I will just cover get requests, which will be used to retrieve data from the API. A get request is a request that asks for data from the server. 

An API specifies a URL and a set of variables that can be used to retrieve data using http requests. The following is the URL where the Seeclickfix API is located: https://Seeclickfix.com/api/v2.

When you go to the Seeclickfix API URL in a web browser, or to any website for that matter, the web browser submits a get request to the URL. If the get request is successful...