Lesson 7: Introduction to Pandas#

Context for Module#

In the last module, we started to see how to process these CSV files. We used the list of dictionaries representation to help us answer questions related to CSVs.

While the list of dictionaries format was helpful, it was still a bit tedious to write all that code. This week, we will learn about a library that puts most of this tedious code “behind the scenes” so you don’t have to write as much. A library is essentially code someone else wrote and packaged up so you can use it. The library we will learn how to use this week is called pandas .

Concepts#

In this lesson, you will learn the following concepts:

  • How to import code defined somewhere else

  • Learning the fundamentals of pandas , including their core data structures DataFrame and Series . As a preview, you will learn:

    • How to read a pandas DataFrame from a CSV

    • How to access a column of a DataFrame and do computations with it

    • How to filter a DataFrame to rows that meet some condition(s)

    • A more generic way of accessing any part of a DataFrame called loc .

Table of Contents#