Katharine Jarmul - Data Wrangling with Python

by Jacqueline Kazil and Katharine Jarmul

Copyright 2016 Jacqueline Kazil and Kjamistan, Inc. All rights reserved.

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• February 2016: First Edition

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Welcome to Data Wrangling with Python! In this book, we will help you take your data skills from a spreadsheet to the next level: leveraging the Python programming language to easily and quickly turn noisy data into usable reports. The easy syntax and quick startup for Python make programming accessible to everyone.

Imagine a manual process you execute weekly, such as copying and pasting data from multiple sources into one spreadsheet for processing. This might take you an hour or two every week. But after youve automated and scripted this task, it may take only 30 seconds to process! This frees up your time to do other things or automate more processes. Or imagine you are able to transform your data in such a way that you can execute tasks you never could before because you simply did not have the ability to process the information in itscurrent form. But after working through Python exercises with this book, you should be able to more effectively gather information from data you previously deemed inaccessible, too messy, or too vast.

We will guide you through the process of data acquisition, cleaning, presentation, scaling, and automation. Our goal is to teach you how to easily wrangle your data, so you can spend more time focused on the content and analysis. We will overcome the limitations of your current tools and replace manual processing with clean, easy-to-read Python code. By the time you finish working through this book, you will have automated your data processing, scheduled file editing and cleanup tasks, acquired and parsed data from locations youmay not have been able to access before, and processed larger datasets.

Using a project-based approach, each chapter will grow in complexity. We encourage you to follow along and apply the methods using your own datasets. If you dont have a particular project or investigation in mind, sample datasets will be available online for your use.