Python Data Analysis claims to "contain all the basic ingredients you need to become an expert data analyst.” Unfortunately, the book is seriously flawed. First, it is a mile wide and barely an inch deep. For many parts of the book, all you get is a paragraph mentioning something and a snippet of source code with no deeper explanation of what’s going on or how it works or nuances of usage. For instance, the section on pivot tables in pandas is just a page, most of it source code, and only demonstrates one way to use the pivot-table functionality without clearly explaining what’s going on. Similarly, with machine learning or databases the book may whet your appetite but you’ll have to read elsewhere to really learn how to use the tools available. Even with plotting, though the subject takes up 20 pages, there’s hardly any explanation of the matplotlib “axes” system of plotting.
Second, the book is riddled with errors, some that are inexcusable and should have been found by an editor. For instance, several times within the first 50 pages the book seems to accidentally include the Python source code used to produce the text of the book (followed by the text produced by such source code)! (It’s hard to explain this, but if you look at the preview pages 43-46 (some parts missing), you’ll get the point; also see p. 33-35 for another example). These are totally wasted pages you’re paying for.
Another example of bad editing occurs on page 32, where the author writes, “We have already learned about the reshape() function,” even though (as far as I can tell) it hadn’t been mentioned prior to that (the index only points us to p. 35).
The writing style is excruciating, with phrasing like this being common: “After connecting to a database, we need a cursor. That’s generally how it works with databases by the way. A database cursor is similar to a cursor in a text editor, in concept at least. We are required to close the cursor as well.” Ugh.
I give 2 stars only because there is some useful information throughout the book, as shallow as it may be, and because the author has at least used a variety of datasets in the examples.
ISBN-13: 978-1783553358
ISBN-10: 1783553359
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