python language essentials knowledge is treasurebut practice is the key to it --thomas fuller people often ask me about good resources for learning python for data-centric applications while there are many excellent python language booksi am usually hesitant to recommend some of them as they are intended for general audience rather than tailored for someone who wants to load in some data setsdo some computationsand plot some of the results there are actually couple of books on "scientific programming in python"but they are geared toward numerical computing and engineering applicationssolving differential equationscomputing integralsdoing monte carlo simulationsand various topics that are more mathematically-oriented rather than being about data analysis and statistics as this is book about becoming proficient at working with data in pythoni think it is valuable to spend some time highlighting the most important features of python' built-in data structures and libraries from the perspective of processing and manipulating structured and unstructured data as suchi will only present roughly enough information to enable you to follow along with the rest of the book this is not intended to be an exhaustive introduction to the python language but rather biasedno-frills overview of features which are used repeatedly throughout this book for new python programmersi recommend that you supplement this with the official python tutorial (many excellent (and much longerbooks on general purpose python programming in my opinionit is not necessary to become proficient at building good software in python to be able to productively do data analysis encourage you to use ipython to experiment with the code examples and to explore the documentation for the various typesfunctionsand methods note that some of the code used in the examples may not necessarily be fully-introduced at this point much of this book focuses on high performance array-based computing tools for working with large data sets in order to use those tools you must often first do some munging to corral messy data into more nicely structured form fortunatelypython is one of www it-ebooks info