Book Image

Data Smart

By : John W. Foreman
Book Image

Data Smart

By: John W. Foreman

Overview of this book

Data Science gets thrown around in the press like it's magic. Major retailers are predicting everything from when their customers are pregnant to when they want a new pair of Chuck Taylors. It's a brave new world where seemingly meaningless data can be transformed into valuable insight to drive smart business decisions. But how does one exactly do data science? Do you have to hire one of these priests of the dark arts, the "data scientist," to extract this gold from your data? Nope. Data science is little more than using straight-forward steps to process raw data into actionable insight. And in Data Smart, author and data scientist John Foreman will show you how that's done within the familiar environment of a spreadsheet. Why a spreadsheet? It's comfortable! You get to look at the data every step of the way, building confidence as you learn the tricks of the trade. Plus, spreadsheets are a vendor-neutral place to learn data science without the hype. But don't let the Excel sheets fool you. This is a book for those serious about learning the analytic techniques, math and the magic, behind big data.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Cover
2
Credits
3
About the Author
4
About the Technical Editors
5
Acknowledgments
18
End User License Agreement

Get Creative and Keep in Touch!

That's enough sage wisdom. If you've labored through the preceding chapters then you have a good base to begin dreaming up, prototyping, and implementing solutions to the analytics opportunities posed by your business. Talk with your coworkers and get creative. Maybe there's an analytical solution for something that's been patched over with gut feelings and manual processes. Attack it.

And as you go through the process of implementing these and other techniques in your work-a-day life, keep in touch. I'm on Twitter at @John4man. Reach out and tell me your tale. Or to give me hell about this book. I'll take any feedback.

Happy data wrangling!