Book Image

The Data Wrangling Workshop - Second Edition

By : Brian Lipp, Shubhadeep Roychowdhury, Dr. Tirthajyoti Sarkar
Book Image

The Data Wrangling Workshop - Second Edition

By: Brian Lipp, Shubhadeep Roychowdhury, Dr. Tirthajyoti Sarkar

Overview of this book

While a huge amount of data is readily available to us, it is not useful in its raw form. For data to be meaningful, it must be curated and refined. If you’re a beginner, then The Data Wrangling Workshop will help to break down the process for you. You’ll start with the basics and build your knowledge, progressing from the core aspects behind data wrangling, to using the most popular tools and techniques. This book starts by showing you how to work with data structures using Python. Through examples and activities, you’ll understand why you should stay away from traditional methods of data cleaning used in other languages and take advantage of the specialized pre-built routines in Python. Later, you’ll learn how to use the same Python backend to extract and transform data from an array of sources, including the internet, large database vaults, and Excel financial tables. To help you prepare for more challenging scenarios, the book teaches you how to handle missing or incorrect data, and reformat it based on the requirements from your downstream analytics tool. By the end of this book, you will have developed a solid understanding of how to perform data wrangling with Python, and learned several techniques and best practices to extract, clean, transform, and format your data efficiently, from a diverse array of sources.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
Preface

Advanced Data Structures

We will start this chapter by discussing advanced data structures. Initially, we will be revisiting lists. Then, we will construct a stack and a queue, explore multiple-element membership checking to check whether the data is accurate, and throw a bit of functional programming in for good measure. Don't worry if all of this sounds intimidating. We will take things step by step, and you will feel confident about handling advanced data structures once you have finished this chapter.

Before we jump into constructing data structures, we'll look at a few methods to manipulate them.

Iterator

Iterators in Python are very useful when dealing with data as they allow you to parse the data one unit at a time. Iterators are stateful, which means it will be helpful to keep track of the previous state. An iterator is an object that implements the next method—meaning an iterator can iterate over collections such as lists, tuples, dictionaries,...