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

Running programs in python


A programming language is a set of syntactical rules to express instructions to the computer. These instructions are written in a computer program, a set of code that is stored in a static file in the file system of a computer.

In this section, you will make a simple program that prints the words Hello World! to the output. Completing this exercise will give you an introduction to the process of creating and running programs in Python.

Using text editors to write and manage programs

Like any other practice, programming requires a certain set of tools.

The first of these is the text editor. Text editors for programming are not like ordinary word processors, which will often apply formatting to text and sometimes force users to save with certain file extensions. Programs need to be saved in a raw format in order to run properly. This can be done with plain text editors such as Notepad in Windows and gedit in Linux; however, there are a few reasons to use a specialized...