Data Science Essentials in Python

I must instruct you in a little science by-and-by, to distract your thoughts.

Marie Corelli, British novelist

Preface

This book was inspired by an introductory data science course in Python that I taught in summer 2015 to a small group of select undergraduate students of Suffolk University in Boston. The course was expected to be the first in a two-course sequence, with an emphasis on obtaining, cleaning, organizing, and visualizing data, sprinkled with some elements of statistics, machine learning, and network analysis.

I quickly came to realize that the abundance of systems and Python modules involved in these operations (databases, natural language processing frameworks, JSON and HTML parsers, and high-performance numerical data structures, ...