Art Yudin - Basic Python for Data Management, Finance, and Marketing: Advance Your Career by Learning the Most Powerful Analytical Tool

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When you are finished changing, youre finished.

Benjamin Franklin

I came to programming relatively late in my life. My job at that time had nothing to do with software development. I was not one of the computer geeks at school and always thought that coding was not for me. Working in the financial industry, I was heavily dependent on Excel and had to do a lot of manual copying and pasting.

One of my routine tasks was to update the budget and email the updated version to the top management. I decided to automate the burden and googled some script that was supposed to perform that duty. At that time, I was not paying any attention if it was Python script or any other code. The result of the enhancement was devastating. Not only my bosses received an empty file, but I had permanently erased the three-year budget project.

The main lesson I learned was if you want to make it right, you have to learn the subject from the bottom up. I had read numerous articles on how Python was used in real life and quickly realized that automation was the future. These days Python is a required knowledge like Excel or email. If youre constantly crunching numbers at work, your career would definitely benefit of productivity and speed that Python has to offer. Having Python under the belt would allow you to write simple scripts or build complex applications.

Compared with other programming languages, Python is user-friendly and has logical and simple-to-learn syntax. With a right approach and regular practice, Python could be picked up in a matter of a couple of months. As my personal experience shows, it is never too late to get started with programming. If you are driven by a motivation to take your business skills to another level and need to evolve, you would never fail in Python.

While learning Python, the main challenge I had faced was excessively technical and sometimes poorly written documentation. It was as if they specifically wanted to confuse nontechnical people with terminology and keep us out of their hi-tech kingdom. That is why many years later after I have conquered the programming world, I have decided to write this book and explain Python programming with plain words for people who never coded before.

I understand that many of you are not planning to work as full-time programmers and need Python as a modern tool to gather, manipulate, and analyze data. That is why this book is structured as an easy-to-follow practical guide. Our main goal here is to get you started with the Python programming language and show you how Python could be used in business life.

I have structured this book based on my extensive teaching experience. We will start with the basics and then gradually move from simple concepts to more complex ones. Many hypotheses and examples we start with in this chapter would evolve and grow into advanced illustrations of how you could use Python to solve complicated cases. By the time you finish the book, you will have a clear understanding of how to apply Python to day-to-day challenges. The most important part is that you will be able to write Python scripts on your own by the end of the exciting journey we are about to embark on.