Wrapping Up
This chapter covered where you can find the data you need and how to manage it after you have it. This is an important step, if not the most important, in the visualization process. A data graphic is only as interesting as its underlying data. You can dress up a graphic all you want, but the data (or the results from your analysis of the data) is still the substance; and now that you know where and how to get your data, you’re already a step ahead of the pack.
You also got your first taste of programming. You scraped data from a website and then formatted and rearranged that data, which will be a useful trick in later chapters. The main takeaway, however, is the logic in the code. You used Python, but you easily could have used Ruby, Perl, or PHP. The logic is the same across languages. When you learn one programming language (and if you’re a programmer already, you can attest to this), it’s much easier to learn other languages later.
You don’t...
