Book Image

Mastering pandas - Second Edition

By : Ashish Kumar
Book Image

Mastering pandas - Second Edition

By: Ashish Kumar

Overview of this book

pandas is a popular Python library used by data scientists and analysts worldwide to manipulate and analyze their data. This book presents useful data manipulation techniques in pandas to perform complex data analysis in various domains. An update to our highly successful previous edition with new features, examples, updated code, and more, this book is an in-depth guide to get the most out of pandas for data analysis. Designed for both intermediate users as well as seasoned practitioners, you will learn advanced data manipulation techniques, such as multi-indexing, modifying data structures, and sampling your data, which allow for powerful analysis and help you gain accurate insights from it. With the help of this book, you will apply pandas to different domains, such as Bayesian statistics, predictive analytics, and time series analysis using an example-based approach. And not just that; you will also learn how to prepare powerful, interactive business reports in pandas using the Jupyter notebook. By the end of this book, you will learn how to perform efficient data analysis using pandas on complex data, and become an expert data analyst or data scientist in the process.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Overview of Data Analysis and pandas
4
Section 2: Data Structures and I/O in pandas
7
Section 3: Mastering Different Data Operations in pandas
12
Section 4: Going a Step Beyond with pandas

How Python and pandas fit into the data analytics pipeline

The Python programming language is one of the fastest-growing languages today in the emerging field of data science and analytics. Python was created by Guido van Rossum in 1991, and its key features include the following:

  • Interpreted rather than compiled
  • Dynamic type system
  • Pass by value with object references
  • Modular capability
  • Comprehensive libraries
  • Extensibility with respect to other languages
  • Object orientation
  • Most of the major programming paradigms: procedural, object-oriented, and, to a lesser extent, functional

For more information, refer to the following article on Python at https://www.python.org/about/.

Among the characteristics that make Python popular for data science are its very user-friendly (human-readable) syntax, the fact that it is interpreted rather than compiled (leading to faster development...