Preface

Data! Everyone is surrounded by it, but few know how to truly exploit it. For those who do, glory awaits!

Okay, so that's a little dramatic; however, being able to turn raw data into actionable information is a goal that every organization is working to achieve. This book helps you achieve it.

Making sense of data isn't some esoteric art requiring multiple degrees—it's a matter of knowing the recipes to take your data through each stage of the process. It all starts with asking an interesting question.

My mission is that, by the end of this book, you will be equipped to apply Python to business intelligence tasks—preparing, exploring, analyzing, visualizing, and reporting—in order to make more informed business decisions using the data at hand.

Prepare for an awesome read, my friend!

A little context first. The code in this book is developed on Mac OS X 10.11.1, using Python 3.4.3, IPython 4.0.0, matplotlib 1.4.3, NumPy 1.9.1, scikit-learn 0.16.1, and Pandas 0.16.2—in other words, the latest or near-latest versions at the time of publishing.