Overview

Welcome to module 2! This module has two main focuses. First, it introduces you to the concept of packages, libraries, and modules. These are three different terms that are often used to refer to the same thing within Python and in this module we’ll clarify how to think about built-in versus third party packages/libraries. This introduction will also help by providing you have a high-level understanding of Python’s data science packaging ecosystem.

Second, we’ll get started on importing data into Python so we can start wrangling real data sets. And since we most often hold our imported data as DataFrames, we’ll start digging into what DataFrames are, what their basic components consist of, and how to start performing a few basic manipulations.

Learning objectives

By the end of this module you should be able to:

• Explain the concept of modules, packages, the standard library, and third party packages.

• Discuss at a high-level Python’s data science ecosystem.

• Import data from a variety of sources and perform basic tasks to understand simple attributes about your imported dataset.

• Perform fundamental tasks with Panda’s Series and DataFrame objects.

Estimated time requirement

The estimated time to go through the module lessons is about 3 hours.