Book Image

The Python Workshop

By : Olivier Pons, Andrew Bird, Dr. Lau Cher Han, Mario Corchero Jiménez, Graham Lee, Corey Wade
Book Image

The Python Workshop

By: Olivier Pons, Andrew Bird, Dr. Lau Cher Han, Mario Corchero Jiménez, Graham Lee, Corey Wade

Overview of this book

Have you always wanted to learn Python, but never quite known how to start? More applications than we realize are being developed using Python because it is easy to learn, read, and write. You can now start learning the language quickly and effectively with the help of this interactive tutorial. The Python Workshop starts by showing you how to correctly apply Python syntax to write simple programs, and how to use appropriate Python structures to store and retrieve data. You'll see how to handle files, deal with errors, and use classes and methods to write concise, reusable, and efficient code. As you advance, you'll understand how to use the standard library, debug code to troubleshoot problems, and write unit tests to validate application behavior. You'll gain insights into using the pandas and NumPy libraries for analyzing data, and the graphical libraries of Matplotlib and Seaborn to create impactful data visualizations. By focusing on entry-level data science, you'll build your practical Python skills in a way that mirrors real-world development. Finally, you'll discover the key steps in building and using simple machine learning algorithms. By the end of this Python book, you'll have the knowledge, skills and confidence to creatively tackle your own ambitious projects with Python.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

The Don'ts of Plotting Graphs

In newspapers, blogs, or social media there are a lot of misleading graphs that make people misunderstand the actual data. You will be going through some of these examples and learn how to avoid them.

Manipulating the Axis

Imagine you have three students with three different scores from an exam. Now, you have to plot their scores on a bar chart. There are two ways to do this: the misleading way, and the right way:

Figure 4.23: Chart A (starts from 80) and Chart B (starts from 0)

Looking at Chart A, it will be interpreted that the score of student A is about 10 times higher than student B and student C. However, that is not the case. The scores for the students are 96, 81, and 80, respectively. Chart A is misleading because the y-axis ranges from 80 to 100. The correct y-axis should range from 0 to 100, as in Chart B. This is simply because the minimum score a student can get is 0, and the maximum score a student can...