Anyone who has worked with real word data knows that it is nasty, brutish and long. It needs cleaning before it can be used, and before you can clean it you need to understand it.

These days, most data scientists use pandas to analyse, clean and crunch structured data.

The author of this book is the creator and BDFL of pandas. His enthusiasm and expertise shine through the book.

The book covers a wide range of topics. The explanations are clear and easy to follow. The data and jupyter notebooks are available on GitHub. If you like learning from books, or need an approachable reference, this book is ideal.

I came across it while taking Coursera’s Introduction to Data Science in Python, where it’s recommended as optional reading. I’ve found the book invaluable for consolidating and extending my knowledge of Python’s data analysis tools.