title: Frequency table for a single variable
body: <p>One last newbie pandas question for the day:  How do I generate a table for a single Series?</p>
  
  <p>For example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>my_series = pandas.Series([1,2,2,3,3,3])
  pandas.magical_frequency_function( my_series )
  
  &gt;&gt; {
       1 : 1,
       2 : 2, 
       3 : 3
     }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Lots of googling has led me to Series.describe() and pandas.crosstabs, but neither of these does quite what I need: one variable, counts by categories.  Oh, and it'd be nice if it worked for different data types: strings, ints, etc.</p>