In Chapter 7, Tidying Up Your Data we examined how to clean up our data in order to get it ready for analysis. Everything that we did focused upon working within the data of a single DataFrame or Series object, and keeping the same structure of data within those objects. Once the data is tidied up, it will be likely that we will then need to use this data either to combine multiple sets of data, or to reorganize the structure of the data by moving data in and out of indexes.

This chapter has two general categories of topics: combination and reshaping of data. The first two sections will cover the capabilities provided by pandas to combine the data from multiple pandas objects together. Combination of data in pandas is performed by concatenating two sets of data, where data is combined simply along either axes but without regard to relationships in the data. Or data can be combined using relationships in the data by using a pandas capability referred...