and tools well-suited for working with financial data in facti initially designed pandas as an ideal tool for financial data analysis applications for users of the language for statistical computingthe dataframe name will be familiaras the object was named after the similar data frame object they are not the samehoweverthe functionality provided by data frame in is essentially strict subset of that provided by the pandas dataframe while this is book about pythoni will occasionally draw comparisons with as it is one of the most widely-used open source data analysis environments and will be familiar to many readers the pandas name itself is derived from panel dataan econometrics term for multidimensional structured data setsand python data analysis itself matplotlib matplotlib is the most popular python library for producing plots and other data visualizations it was originally created by john hunter (jdhand is now maintained by large team of developers it is well-suited for creating plots suitable for publication it integrates well with ipython (see below)thus providing comfortable interactive environment for plotting and exploring data the plots are also interactiveyou can zoom in on section of the plot and pan around the plot using the toolbar in the plot window ipython ipython is the component in the standard scientific python toolset that ties everything together it provides robust and productive environment for interactive and exploratory computing it is an enhanced python shell designed to accelerate the writingtestingand debugging of python code it is particularly useful for interactively working with data and visualizing data with matplotlib ipython is usually involved with the majority of my python workincluding runningdebuggingand testing code aside from the standard terminal-based ipython shellthe project also provides mathematica-like html notebook for connecting to ipython through web browser (more on this latera qt framework-based gui console with inline plottingmultiline editingand syntax highlighting an infrastructure for interactive parallel and distributed computing will devote to ipython and how to get the most out of its features strongly recommend using it while working through this book essential python libraries www it-ebooks info