A book about data analysis with Python using the popular Pandas library (de-facto standard for data wrangling), written by the creator of Pandas himself. Or as I like to call it: The Pandas Book.
First of, don't get me wrong: The 3-star rating doesn't mean this is not a good book. It just wasn't written in a style that I would have personally preferred.
Pros:
Very extensive coverage of (almost) the complete Pandas API. I feel like I have seen (and tried) all major Pandas features now.
Many code examples to see features in action.
Excellent last chapter where the author goes through real-world data sets and shows how to explore and analyse data using Pandas features.
Cons:
Large majority of examples using dummy data (foo and bar and random numbers). While this shows the technical interface, it didn't help me grasp the application potential in many cases.
The structure made the book feel like official API documentation extended with a bit of prose. To be fair, the author made that clear in the preface, but the book had promised me a "hands-on guide (...) packed with practical case studies", and I only found that to be true in the last chapter.
What helped me was having a group of friends to discuss the book. We read one chapter a week and shared our notebooks of playing around with Pandas and our own data sets. While I personally prefer a slightly different style of coding books, studying this one has helped tremendously in becoming more familiar and confident in using Pandas for my data science projects.
A book about data analysis with Python using the popular Pandas library (de-facto standard for data wrangling), written by the creator of Pandas himself. Or as I like to call it: The Pandas Book.
First of, don't get me wrong: The 3-star rating doesn't mean this is not a good book. It just wasn't written in a style that I would have personally preferred.
Pros:
Cons:
fooandbarand random numbers). While this shows the technical interface, it didn't help me grasp the application potential in many cases.What helped me was having a group of friends to discuss the book. We read one chapter a week and shared our notebooks of playing around with Pandas and our own data sets. While I personally prefer a slightly different style of coding books, studying this one has helped tremendously in becoming more familiar and confident in using Pandas for my data science projects.