Python Data Science Handbook: Essential Tools for Working with Data PDF

The book is not meant to be an introduction to Python or to programming in general; I assume the reader has familiarity with the Python language, including defining functions, assigning variables, calling methods of objects, controlling the flow of a program, and other basic tasks. Instead, it is meant to help Python users learn to use Python’s data science stack — libraries such as IPython, NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Scikit-Learn, and related tools — to effectively store, manipulate, and gain insight from data.

Python has emerged over the last couple decades as a first-class tool for scientific computing tasks, including the analysis and visualization of large datasets. This may have come as a surprise to early proponents of the Python language: the language itself was not specifically designed with data analysis or scientific computing in mind. The usefulness of Python for data science stems primarily from the large and active ecosystem of third-party packages: NumPy for manipulation of homogeneous array-based data, Pandas for manipulation of heterogeneous and labeled data, SciPy for common scientific computing tasks, Matplotlib for publication-quality visualizations, IPython for interactive execution and sharing of code, Scikit-Learn for machine learning, and many more tools that will be mentioned in the following pages. (Python Data Science Handbook: Essential Tools for Working with Data; Jake VanderPlas; O’Reilly Media [2016]; Preface: Page xi)