outside of an internet searchthe scientific python mailing lists are generally helpful and responsive to questions some ones to take look at arepydataa google group list for questions related to python for data analysis and pandas pystatsmodelsfor statsmodels or pandas-related questions numpy-discussionfor numpy-related questions scipy-userfor general scipy or scientific python questions deliberately did not post urls for these in case they change they can be easily located via internet search each year many conferences are held all over the world for python programmers pycon and europython are the two main general python conferences in the united states and europerespectively scipy and euroscipy are scientific-oriented python conferences where you will likely find many "birds of featherif you become more involved with using python for data analysis after reading this book navigating this book if you have never programmed in python beforeyou may actually want to start at the end of the bookwhere have placed condensed tutorial on python syntaxlanguage featuresand built-in data structures like tupleslistsand dicts these things are considered prerequisite knowledge for the remainder of the book the book starts by introducing you to the ipython environment nexti give short introduction to the key features of numpyleaving more advanced numpy use for another at the end of the book theni introduce pandas and devote the rest of the book to data analysis topics applying pandasnumpyand matplotlib (for visualizationi have structured the material in the most incremental way possiblethough there is occasionally some minor cross-over between data files and related material for each are hosted as git repository on githubi encourage you to download the data and use it to replicate the book' code examples and experiment with the tools presented in each will happily accept contributionsscriptsipython notebooksor any other materials you wish to contribute to the book' repository for all to enjoy preliminaries www it-ebooks info