Dec 27 2012
Book Review: Python for Data Analysis by Wes – O’Reilly
Python getting become the heart of data analysis works. You can see variety of books taught machine learning, data analysis and big data processing based on Python. To get into that world, this book is the basic to learn Python ecosystem for data analysis.
Pandas is one of the notable data analysis library along with the famous NumPy and SciPy libraries. Wes McKinney who has implemented Pandas has written this book.
As a primer for data analysis, this book has been well written. With the enough sample data for learning purpose, Wes explains NumPy, Pandas and matplotlib libraries in addition to the knowledge required on file handling, data loading, storage, wrangling and aggregation.
Wes spent a worthy spaces for IPython – an elegant command line IDE for Python data analysis.
As a basic learning book, notable effort taken for the sample data like MovieLens, US Baby Names, USD food database. These helps the reader to understand those libraries practically.
Sometime you may get a feel of 470 pages is a very detail oriented for just learning Python libraries. It is up to your comfort level to make short cut.
Python for Data Analysis would be your first and good stepping stone for to work on “Data Analysis or Machine Learning” field. This book is worth buy.
For book details: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/784.do
A polyglot programmer, Cloud Architect, blogger, speaker and technical consultant. Working as Cloud Architect at Aditi Technologies.