Introduction
The goal of this chapter is to introduce a foundation of pandas by thoroughly inspecting the Series and DataFrame data structures. It is important for pandas users to know the difference between a Series and a DataFrame.
The pandas library is useful for dealing with structured data. What is structured data? Data that is stored in tables, such as CSV files, Excel spreadsheets, or database tables, is all structured. Unstructured data consists of free form text, images, sound, or video. If you find yourself dealing with structured data, pandas will be of great utility to you.
In this chapter, you will learn how to select a single column of data from a DataFrame (a two-dimensional dataset), which is returned as a Series (a one-dimensional dataset). Working with this one-dimensional object makes it easy to show how different methods and operators work. Many Series methods return another Series as output. This leads to the possibility of calling further methods in succession...