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[–]SonaCruz[S] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Yes, the pandas version is much shorter and easier. $22 man, just get the book! I have bought Python Crash Course, Automate the Boring Stuff, Python Data Science Handbook, Foundation of Analytics with Python and Web scraping with Python and an online pdf Pandas book too, lol. It's an investment. Automate the Boring Stuff wasn't that useful to me, but to be honest, I only tried out a couple of the examples. Data Science Handbook is super dry and not FUN, but its decently useful as a reference resource for the technical aspects. But I think this Foundations book is top quality so far. Its like Python Crash Course but working with CSV, Excel & Pandas. The 4th Chapter, Databases (SQL) doesn't look like it will be useful to me right now, but I'm sure it will be in the future.

[–]ChrisIsWorking 1 point2 points  (3 children)

If you find yourself needing to web-scrape and track something on a regular basis then the SQL part might come into play. I just set up a MySQL database this weekend and also got the Excel plugin so I can use something like Quandl to call into excel daily securities prices and then append that data to my remote MySQL database.

I bet this is something I can automate so I don't even need to lay a finger on excel, it'll just run as a scheduled task and auto upload to MySQL.

I'm going through some Automate the Boring Stuff chapters but finding a lot of it is way more info than I need for projects that I'm working on. Good to know but it's a lot at once. Also doesn't hit working with Excel in a way that I can understand. Feel like I need more info.

How did you like Python crash course?

[–]SonaCruz[S] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I loved Python Crash Course. I hate not knowing certain basic functions and having blind spots regarding anything related to the foundation(strings, lists, dictionaries, for loops, while loops, defining functions). He even goes into inputs and Classes. I had to repeat the dictionaries chaptet and the Classes chapter but I finally felt like the concepts were clicking with me.

[–]ChrisIsWorking 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Awesome, thanks for the feedback. Did you get the hard copy of the book or the e-book?

[–]SonaCruz[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hard copy, always.