Practice makes perfect Pandas. Work out your pandas skills against dozens of real-world challenges, each carefully designed to build an intuitive knowledge of essential pandas tasks. Many people use NumPy — but “pandas” extends NumPy, providing additional functionality that makes it easy, and even fun, to do data analysis. You can think of “pandas” as an automatic transmission, compared with NumPy’s manual transmission. Both work, but “pandas” makes it easier, and allows us to think at a higher level of abstraction. The thing is, “pandas” uses data structures that look and act different from regular Python data structures. And many of the classic techniques for working with Python are a bad idea with “pandas”. So learning what you should (and shouldn’t) do with “pandas” can take some time, even if you’re an old hand with Python. This book contains 50 main exercises, and another 150 smaller exercises, aimed at helping you become more fluent with “pandas” through these sorts of hands-on challenges. The solution will usually be very short, often involving one line of code. But figuring out what to write, and which of the many possible “pandas” techniques is most applicable, can take some time.