Who this book is for

This book contains a huge number of recipes, ranging from very simple to advanced. All recipes strive to be written in clear, concise, and modern idiomatic pandas code. The How it works sections contain extremely detailed descriptions of the intricacies of each step of the recipe. Often, in the There’s more… section, you will get what may seem like an entirely new recipe. This book is densely packed with an extraordinary amount of pandas code.

While not strictly required, users are advised to read the book chronologically. The recipes are structured in such a way that they first introduce concepts and features using very small, directed examples, but continuously build from there into more complex applications.

Due to the wide range of complexity, this book can be useful to both novice and everyday users alike. It has been my experience that even those who use pandas regularly will not master it without being exposed to idiomatic pandas code. This is somewhat fostered by the breadth that pandas offers. There are almost always multiple ways of completing the same operation, which can have users get the result they want but in a very inefficient manner. It is not uncommon to see an order of magnitude or more in performance difference between two sets of pandas solutions to the same problem.

The only real prerequisite for this book is a fundamental knowledge of Python. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with all the common built-in data containers in Python, such as lists, sets, dictionaries, and tuples.