Book Image

Big Data Analysis with Python

By : Ivan Marin, Ankit Shukla, Sarang VK
Book Image

Big Data Analysis with Python

By: Ivan Marin, Ankit Shukla, Sarang VK

Overview of this book

Processing big data in real time is challenging due to scalability, information inconsistency, and fault tolerance. Big Data Analysis with Python teaches you how to use tools that can control this data avalanche for you. With this book, you'll learn practical techniques to aggregate data into useful dimensions for posterior analysis, extract statistical measurements, and transform datasets into features for other systems. The book begins with an introduction to data manipulation in Python using pandas. You'll then get familiar with statistical analysis and plotting techniques. With multiple hands-on activities in store, you'll be able to analyze data that is distributed on several computers by using Dask. As you progress, you'll study how to aggregate data for plots when the entire data cannot be accommodated in memory. You'll also explore Hadoop (HDFS and YARN), which will help you tackle larger datasets. The book also covers Spark and explains how it interacts with other tools. By the end of this book, you'll be able to bootstrap your own Python environment, process large files, and manipulate data to generate statistics, metrics, and graphs.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
Big Data Analysis with Python
Preface

Code Practices and Standards


Writing code with a set of practices and standards is important for code reproducibility, as is explaining the workflow of the process descriptively in a step-wise manner.

This is universally applicable across any coding tool that you may use, not just with Jupyter. Some coding practices and standards should be followed strictly and a few of these will be discussed in the next section.

Environment Documentation

For installation purposes, you should maintain a snippet of code to install the necessary packages and libraries. The following practices help with code reproducibility:

  • Include the versions used for libraries/packages.

  • Download the original version of packages/libraries used and call the packages internally for installation in a new setup.

  • Effective implementation by running it in a script that automatically installs dependencies.

Writing Readable Code with Comments

Code commenting is an important aspect. Apart from the markdown option available on Jupyter,...