CSV formatted data is likely to be one of the most common forms of data you may use in pandas. Many web-based services provide data in a CSV format, as well as many information systems within an enterprise. It is an easy format to use and is commonly used as an export format for spreadsheet applications such as Excel.
A CSV is a file consisting of multiple lines of text-based data, with values separated by commas. It can be thought of as a table of data similar to a single sheet in a spreadsheet program. Each row of the data is in its own line in the file, and each column for each row is stored in text format, with a comma separating the data in each column.
For more details on the specifics of CSV files, feel free to visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma-separated_values.
As CSV is so common and easily understood, we will spend...