General Usage and Performance Tips

At this point in the book, we have covered a rather large part of the pandas library while walking through sample applications to reinforce good usage. Equipped with all of this knowledge, you are now well prepared to step into the real world and start applying everything you have learned to your data analysis problems.

This chapter will offer some tips and tricks you should keep in mind as you go out on your own. The recipes presented in this chapter are common mistakes I see by pandas users of all experience levels. While well-intentioned, improper usage of pandas constructs can leave a lot of performance on the table. When your datasets are smaller in size that may not be a big issue, but data has the tendency to grow, not to retreat in size. Using proper idioms and avoiding the maintenance burden of inefficient code can yield significant time and money savings for your organization.

We are going to cover the following recipes in this...