Chapter 6. Accessing Data

pandas is a tool that is used to manipulate and analyze data. But where does this data come from? It is almost universal that any pandas application will start by loading data from an outside source. As pandas is built on Python, you can use any means available in Python to retrieve data from outside the application. This really makes the possibility of the data that can be accessed unlimited, including files, excel spreadsheets, web sites and services, databases, and cloud services.

However, using Python to load data will require you to convert Python objects into pandas Series or DataFrame objects, increasing the complexity of your code. Fortunately, over the evolution of pandas, it has become apparent that there is a frequently used set of data access patterns, as well as data formats that were so commonly used, that direct support for them was added into the core of pandas. These often make retrieving data from outside sources, directly as a pandas...