The goal of this chapter is to introduce a foundation of pandas by thoroughly inspecting the Series and DataFrame data structures. It is vital for pandas users to know each component of the Series and the DataFrame, and to understand that each column of data in pandas holds precisely one data type.

In this chapter, you will learn how to select a single column of data from a DataFrame, which is returned as a Series. Working with this one-dimensional object makes it easy to show how different methods and operators work. Many Series methods return another Series as output. This leads to the possibility of calling further methods in succession, which is known as method chaining.

The Index component of the Series and DataFrame is what separates pandas from most other data analysis libraries and is the key to understanding how many operations work. We will get a glimpse of this powerful object when we use it as a meaningful label for Series values. The final two recipes contain simple tasks that frequently occur during a data analysis.