Chapter 1: Introduction to pandas
From creating basic DataFrames to optimizing your code, this chapter will serve as a crash course that will help you realize, through code examples and practical exercises, the prowess of pandas in data wrangling and analytics. By the end of this chapter, you will have gained rudimentary experience in reading and writing data, performing DataFrame aggregation, working with time series, preprocessing before modeling, data visualization, and more. You will also be able to create datasets and perform preprocessing tasks on them. You will implement most of the core features of the library, which we will cover in more depth in the chapters that follow. The final chapter of this book will help you consolidate what you've learned through a series of activities.
In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Introduction to the world of pandas
- Exploring the history and evolution of pandas
- Components and applications of pandas
- Understanding the basic concepts of pandas
- Activity 1.01 – comparing sales data for two stores
