Blog
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Improve your “pandas” skills with “Pandas Workout”
As you might know, I’ve been working lately on my new book, Pandas Workout, with 50 exercises to improve your fluency using the “pandas” library for data analysis. Well, I have exciting news: The book is now available as a MEAP, aka the “Manning Early Access Program.” This means that if you buy the book…
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Python parameters primer
Python makes it easy to write functions. For example, I can write: def hello(name): return f’Hello, {name}!’ I can then run the function with: hello(‘world’) which will then, not surprisingly, return the string ‘Hello, world’ Here’s a question that doesn’t come up much: How does Python assign the string argument ‘world’ to the parameter “name”?…
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It’s time to learn Python
I’m on a mission: I want to help people to do more in less time, and to have better careers. How? Using Python. If you’re reading this, then you might already be convinced that Python is both easy to learn and impressively powerful. And you hopefully benefit from this power, either in your day-to-day work…
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Write better Python functions!
Whether you’re a newcomer to Python or an old hand, you’re probably writing lots of functions — functions that perform calculations, functions that parse files, functions that check passwords, and functions that contact remote APIs. But in Python, functions are more than just verbs. They’re also nouns: They’re objects that we can store in data…
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One year of “Python for non-programmers”
In the spring of last year, as the coronavirus pandemic began, it was pretty clear that this would be the major event of our lives, and that a lot of people were going to be affected in big, terrible ways — beyond the issues related to the virus itself, and the injury it created. Schools…
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Reminder: Weekly Python Exercise B1 (advanced topics 1) starts on Tuesday!
If you’ve been using Python for a year or more, and want to sharpen your skills, then I have good news: A new cohort of Weekly Python Exercise starts this coming Tuesday. The course has a simple formula, but one that works: Every Tuesday, for the 15 weeks of the course, you get a question…
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You can, but should you? Combining some of Python’s more esoteric features
Note: As usual, readers of my blog (and my students) found a simpler and more elegant solution than I did… I knew that the boolean “or” operator returned the first “True” value it encountered, but I completely forgot that if it only encounters “False” values, it returns the final one. So there was a far…
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This Black Friday, get 40% off all 25 of my Python, Git, and data science courses
It’s time: My Black Friday sale, with 40% off all 25 products in my online store, is live! What am I offering? All of my courses about Python, Git, and data science are 40% off, including the seven (!) courses I’ve published since this time last year. The new courses are: Advanced Python objects Advanced…
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Reminder: My “Intro to SQL” course is this Sunday!
This is just a reminder that on Sunday, I’ll be teaching a live, 4-hour introductory course on databases and SQL. If you haven’t ever worked with databases before, then this will give you the push that you need to understand how they work, and how to work effectively with them. I’ve been using SQL for…
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Join the data revolution with my “Intro to SQL” course!
Have you heard? Data is “the new oil” — meaning, data is the most valuable and important thing in the modern world. Which means that if you can store, retrieve, and organize your data, then you (and your company) are positioned for greater success. This usually means working with a database — and frequently, a…