To get the most out of this book

Readers should be proficient in Python at the level of slicing lists, writing your own functions, and using dot-notation. General familiarity with linear algebra at the level of accessing rows and columns in matrices will be sufficient. A background in pandas and machine learning is helpful but not required as all code and concepts are explained along the way.

This book uses the latest versions of Python in Jupyter Notebook with the Anaconda distribution. Anaconda is highly recommended since all major data science libraries are included. It's worth updating Anaconda before getting started. The following section provides detailed instructions to set up your coding environment like ours.