Books published by Pragmatic Bookshelf

When you write software, you need to be at the top of your game. Great programmers practice to keep their skills sharp. Get sharp and stay sharp with more than fifty practice exercises rooted in real-world scenarios. If you're a new programmer, these challenges will help you learn what you need to break into the field, and if you're a seasoned pro, you can use these exercises to learn that hot new language for your next gig.One of the best ways to learn a programming language is to use it to solve problems. That's what this book is all about. Instead of questions rooted in theory, this book presents problems you'll encounter in everyday software development. These problems are designed for people learning their first programming language, and they also provide a learning path for experienced developers to learn a new language quickly.Start with simple input and output programs. Do some currency conversion and figure out how many months it takes to pay off a credit card. Calculate blood alcohol content and determine if it's safe to drive. Replace words in files and filter records, and use web services to display the weather, store data, and show how many people are in space right now. At the end you'll tackle a few larger programs that will help you bring everything together.Each problem includes constraints and challenges to push you further, but it's up to you to come up with the solutions. And next year, when you want to learn a new programming language or style of programming (perhaps OOP vs. functional), you can work through this book again, using new approaches to solve familiar problems.What You Need:You need access to a computer, a programming language reference, and the programming language you want to use.

Go from messy, unstructured artifacts stored in SQL and NoSQL databases to a neat, well-organized dataset with this quick reference for the busy data scientist. Understand text mining, machine learning, and network analysis; process numeric data with the NumPy and Pandas modules; describe and analyze data using statistical and network-theoretical methods; and see actual examples of data analysis at work. This one-stop solution covers the essential data science you need in Python.Data science is one of the fastest-growing disciplines in terms of academic research, student enrollment, and employment. Python, with its flexibility and scalability, is quickly overtaking the R language for data-scientific projects. Keep Python data-science concepts at your fingertips with this modular, quick reference to the tools used to acquire, clean, analyze, and store data.This one-stop solution covers essential Python, databases, network analysis, natural language processing, elements of machine learning, and visualization. Access structured and unstructured text and numeric data from local files, databases, and the Internet. Arrange, rearrange, and clean the data. Work with relational and non-relational databases, data visualization, and simple predictive analysis (regressions, clustering, and decision trees). See how typical data analysis problems are handled. And try your hand at your own solutions to a variety of medium-scale projects that are fun to work on and look good on your resume.Keep this handy quick guide at your side whether you're a student, an entry-level data science professional converting from R to Python, or a seasoned Python developer who doesn't want to memorize every function and option.What You Need:You need a decent distribution of Python 3.3 or above that includes at least NLTK, Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib, Networkx, SciKit-Learn, and BeautifulSoup. A great distribution that meets the requirements is Anaconda, available for free from www.continuum.io. If you plan to set up your own database servers, you also need MySQL (www.mysql.com) and MongoDB (www.mongodb.com). Both packages are free and run on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.