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

A programmer's resources


The art of programming is the art of constantly learning. Every new framework, paradigm, and programming challenge can present a need to learn something new. While there's no one formula for how to keep up to date with trends and tackle new problems, two resources in particular will be instrumental to being an effective programmer.

Documentation

Whenever starting out with a new language or package, the first thing to look for is the documentation. Good documentation usually contains information on how to get started, examples and use cases, and most importantly, references that will tell you how to use the language/package/tool. You can often find the documentation you are looking for by searching <name of language or package> documentation. Documentation is often the first line of defense in learning how to do what you want with a certain programming tool. The documentation for Python, for example, can be found at https://docs.Python.org.

Online forums and mailing...