introductory examples this book teaches you the python tools to work productively with data while readers may have many different end goals for their workthe tasks required generally fall into number of different broad groupsinteracting with the outside world reading and writing with variety of file formats and databases preparation cleaningmungingcombiningnormalizingreshapingslicing and dicingand transforming data for analysis transformation applying mathematical and statistical operations to groups of data sets to derive new data sets for exampleaggregating large table by group variables modeling and computation connecting your data to statistical modelsmachine learning algorithmsor other computational tools presentation creating interactive or static graphical visualizations or textual summaries in this will show you few data sets and some things we can do with them these examples are just intended to pique your interest and thus will only be explained at high level don' worry if you have no experience with any of these toolsthey will be discussed in great detail throughout the rest of the book in the code examples you'll see input and output prompts like in [ ]:these are from the ipython shell usa gov data from bit ly in url shortening service bit ly partnered with the united states government website usa gov to provide feed of anonymous data gathered from users who shorten links ending with gov or mil as of this writingin addition to providing live feedhourly snapshots are available as downloadable text files www it-ebooks info