numpyshort for numerical pythonis the foundational package for scientific computing in python the majority of this book will be based on numpy and libraries built on top of numpy it providesamong other thingsa fast and efficient multidimensional array object ndarray functions for performing element-wise computations with arrays or mathematical operations between arrays tools for reading and writing array-based data sets to disk linear algebra operationsfourier transformand random number generation tools for integrating connecting cc++and fortran code to python beyond the fast array-processing capabilities that numpy adds to pythonone of its primary purposes with regards to data analysis is as the primary container for data to be passed between algorithms for numerical datanumpy arrays are much more efficient way of storing and manipulating data than the other built-in python data structures alsolibraries written in lower-level languagesuch as or fortrancan operate on the data stored in numpy array without copying any data pandas pandas provides rich data structures and functions designed to make working with structured data fasteasyand expressive it isas you will seeone of the critical ingredients enabling python to be powerful and productive data analysis environment the primary object in pandas that will be used in this book is the dataframea twodimensional tabularcolumn-oriented data structure with both row and column labelsframe total_bill tip sex female male male male female male male male male male smoker no no no no no no no no no no day sun sun sun sun sun sun sun sun sun sun time dinner dinner dinner dinner dinner dinner dinner dinner dinner dinner size pandas combines the high performance array-computing features of numpy with the flexible data manipulation capabilities of spreadsheets and relational databases (such as sqlit provides sophisticated indexing functionality to make it easy to reshapeslice and diceperform aggregationsand select subsets of data pandas is the primary tool that we will use in this book preliminaries www it-ebooks info