We live in a big data era characterized by the 4V's- volume, velocity, variety, and veracity. The volume and velocity of data are ever increasing for the foreseeable future. Companies that can harness and analyze big data to extract information and take actionable decisions based on this information will be the winners in the marketplace. Python is a fast-growing, user-friendly, extensible language that is very popular for data analysis.

The pandas is a core library of the Python toolkit for data analysis. It provides features and capabilities that make it much easier and faster for data analysis than many other popular languages such as Java, C, C++, and Ruby.

Thus, given the strengths of Python listed in the preceding section as a choice for the analysis of data, the data analysis practitioner utilizing Python should become quite adept at pandas in order to become more effective. This book aims to assist the user in achieving this goal.