Preface

We are becoming awash in the flood of digital data from scientific research, engineering, economics, politics, journalism, business, and many other domains. As a result, analyzing, visualizing, and harnessing data is the occupation of an increasingly large and diverse set of people. Quantitative skills such as programming, numerical computing, mathematics, statistics, and data mining, which form the core of data science, are more and more appreciated in a seemingly endless plethora of fields.

Python, a widely-known programming language, is also one of the leading open platforms for data science. IPython is a mature Python project that provides scientist-friendly interactive access to Python. It is part of the broader Project Jupyter, which aims to provide high-quality environments for interactive computing, data analysis, visualization, and the authoring of interactive scientific documents. Jupyter is estimated to have several million users today.

The prequel of this book, Learning IPython for Interactive Computing and Data Visualization Second Edition, Packt Publishing was published in 2015, two years after the first edition. It is a beginner-level introduction to data science and numerical computing with Python, IPython, and Jupyter.

This book, the first edition of which was published in 2014, continues that journey by presenting more than 100 recipes for interactive scientific computing and data science. These recipes not only cover programming topics such as numerical computing, high-performance computing, parallel computing, and interactive visualization, but also data analysis topics such as statistics, data mining, machine learning, signal processing, graph theory, numerical optimization, and many others.

This second edition is fully compatible with the latest versions of the platform and its libraries. It includes new recipes to better leverage the latest features of Python 3, and it introduces promising new projects such as JupyterLab, Altair, and Dask.

Note

By design, this book privileges breadth over depth. A particularly wide range of libraries and techniques are covered in this book, but not comprehensively. We give many references that let you deepen your knowledge of individual methods. The goal of this book is not to make you an expert of the subjects covered, but to give you a glimpse of the extremely diverse set of applications that you can tackle with the platform.

All the recipes in this book, which cover a specific techniques, are available online as a Jupyter notebook. This interactive document lets you read, execute, and modify the code interactively, which makes the learning process more engaging and dynamic.

Almost all of this book's content is available online on the GitHub platform (http://ipython-books.github.io/). Updates and corrections will be regularly published there, so you should make sure you check out the latest version of the book online.