I got this book when I was transitioning to doing data science with Python and was struggling to become familiar with standard tools. It's written by the creator of Pandas, and follows the style of the Pandas documentation: dense, telegraphic, peppered with examples.
It's hard work because Wes McKinney often does not articulate why you would need to do something (assuming you are already knowledgeable on the underlying process), and writes like an impatient person who would rather be doing something else. Additionally examples often suffer from being both too long and too short - too long in that almost every example is on a toy dataset created from scratch, too short in that most of those datasets have only 5 or 10 elements and do not always showcase complex operations. Other examples (particularly involving time series) have an overabundance of data that make the critical results hard to spot. Frankly, my first month with Pandas was a miserable one.
But I give the book 5 stars both because I came to love Pandas as I got more familiar with it, and because while McKinney is not fun to read, he does pack the book with useful information and it is (mostly) well organized. If anything it would benefit from being longer and with a more patient treatment of larger and more concrete datasets (eg the Titanic passenger dataset used in the Pandas documentation). The initial chapter on the basics of using Python could go - if you need this book, then you don't want to be trying to learn the rudiments of Python from it. If you can accept that you'll need a lot of bookmarks or margin notes to get through a rather steep learning curve, it will reward your persistence.
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From the Publisher
What Is This Book About?
This book is concerned with the nuts and bolts of manipulating, processing, cleaning, and crunching data in Python. My goal is to offer a guide to the parts of the Python programming language and its data-oriented library ecosystem and tools that will equip you to become an effective data analyst. While 'data analysis' is in the title of the book, the focus is specifically on Python programming, libraries, and tools as opposed to data analysis methodology. This is the Python programming you need for data analysis.
New for the Second Edition
The first edition of this book was published in 2012, during a time when open source data analysis libraries for Python (such as pandas) were very new and developing rapidly. In this updated and expanded second edition, I have overhauled the chapters to account both for incompatible changes and deprecations as well as new features that have occurred in the last five years.
I’ve also added fresh content to introduce tools that either did not exist in 2012 or had not matured enough to make the first cut. Finally, I have tried to avoid writing about new or cutting-edge open source projects that may not have had a chance to mature. I would like readers of this edition to find that the content is still almost as relevant in 2020 or 2021 as it is in 2017.
The major updates in this second edition include:
- All code, including the Python tutorial, updated for Python 3.6 (the first edition used Python 2.7)
- Updated Python install instructions for the Anaconda Python Distribution & other Python packages
- Updates for the latest versions of the pandas library in 2017
- A new chapter on some more advanced pandas tools, and some other usage tips
- A brief introduction to using statsmodels and scikit-learn
- Reorganized since from the first edition to make the book more accessible to newcomers.
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Poor quality binding but great content.
Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2020
Great content. Five star content. But, pages started coming off the binding one day after I got this in the mail. Loved the first edition and bought this just for the updates, so I can definitely recommend the content. However I can’t recommend the book itself.
Reviewed in the United States on January 15, 2020
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Top reviews from other countries
Sam
Definitely required material for diving into Python machine learning
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 17, 2018Adeel
Good reference book but thats about it!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 1, 2020Pav
Content good. Print quality bad!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 31, 2020mr d k stuckey
Wes is a great writer and teacher
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 7, 2018
