Reading the data – variations and examples

Before we delve deeper into the realm of data, let us familiarize ourselves with a few terms that will appear frequently from now on.

Data frames

A data frame is one of the most common data structures available in Python. Data frames are very similar to the tables in a spreadsheet or a SQL table. In Python vocabulary, it can also be thought of as a dictionary of series objects (in terms of structure). A data frame, like a spreadsheet, has index labels (analogous to rows) and column labels (analogous to columns). It is the most commonly used pandas object and is a 2D structure with columns of different or same types. Most of the standard operations, such as aggregation, filtering, pivoting, and so on which can be applied on a spreadsheet or the SQL table can be applied to data frames using methods in pandas.

The following screenshot is an illustrative picture of a data frame. We will learn more about working with them as we progress in the...