Chapter 1 - But What IS Pandas?

1.01 Welcome to Pandas (7 min.) Sample Lesson
1.02 But What Is Pandas? (6 min.) Quiz: 1.02 But What Is Pandas?
1.03 Installing Pyton, Pandas, Numpy (12 min.) Quiz: 1.03 Installing Pyton, Pandas, Numpy
1.04a Pandas Basics (12 min.)
1.04b Pandas Basics - Loading & Exploring Data (Live Coding) (25 min.) Quiz: 1.04b Pandas Basics - Loading & Exploring Data (Live Coding)

Chapter 2 - Exploiting Pandas

2.01a Indexing in Depth (Part 1 - Integer-Based Indexing) (15 min.)
2.01b Indexing in Depth (Part 2 - Label-Based Indexing) (13 min.)
2.01c Indexing in Depth (Part 3 - Chaotic Indexing) (11 min.) Quiz: 2.01c Indexing in Depth (Part 3 - Chaotic Indexing)
2.02a Dtypes & Manipulating Missing Data (17 min.)
2.02b Dtypes & Manipulating Missing Data - Oil & Gas Data Cleanup (Live Coding) (19 min.) Quiz: 2.02b Dtypes & Manipulating Missing Data - Oil & Gas Data Cleanup (Live Coding)
2.03 Combining Dataframes (19 min.) Quiz: 2.03 Combining Dataframes
2.04a Dealing with Grouples, Pivot Tables & Beyond (18 min.)
2.04b Dealing with Grouples, Pivot Tables & Beyond - Groupby & Pivots (Live Coding) (45 min.) Quiz: 2.04b Dealing with Grouples, Pivot Tables & Beyond - Groupby & Pivots (Live Coding)
2.05a Python Is Not Just Pandas (Part 1) (5 min.)
2.05b Python Is Not Just Pandas (Part 2 - Live Coding) (34 min.)
2.05c Python Is Not Just Pandas (Part 3) (7 min.)
2.06 So Long And Thanks For All The Pandas (14 min.)

Practical Pandas for Petro-Professionals / Chapter 1 - But What IS Pandas?

Lesson 1.01 Welcome to Pandas

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Transcript

01. Practical Pandas for Petro-Professionals - Lesson 1.01: Welcome to Pandas 02. Who This Class Is For 03. Course Objectives For Your Boss 04. About Us 05. Your Role In This Course 06. What You Need For This Course

01. Practical Pandas for Petro-Professionals - Lesson 1.01: Welcome to Pandas

Welcome to Practical Pandas for Petro-Professionals. The alliteratively named follow-on to our "Practical Python Programming for Engineers" course. We are Terminus. I'm Derrick Turk.
I'm Katherine Turk.
And this is Lesson 1.01: Welcome to Pandas.
If you took my previous Python programming course, you probably remember I have a low opinion of the Pandas Python library. With that in mind, you may ask yourself why are we teaching a course on Pandas?
Some people say it's because of the money.
That's actually quite true. We are teaching this course by popular demand. Those of you who responded to our surveys after the first course overwhelmingly indicated, granted overwhelming out of a small denominator, but overwhelmingly indicated that Pandas was your top topic for a follow-on Python programming course. I think there are a couple of good reasons to teach a Pandas course. One is, it is a tool which is useful under certain circumstances. The second is that it's gaining in popularity at an incredible rate. It's actually sort of devoured the world of Python programming for data science and engineering. And so to paraphrase the old public service announcement, if you don't talk to your kids about Pandas, who will?

02. Who This Class Is For

This class is aimed at professionals, mostly engineers, geologists, scientists, techs, and others who have a basic understanding of Python and are interested in learning the Pandas library. While this course is tailored to beginners a little more so than our first course, it can also be useful to people who have many years of experience in programming because we are going to dive into some common pitfalls of Pandas, and we're going to dive into a couple really important aspects of the Pandas library. So even if this is your first time taking a programming class or something you've been doing for years, there's something for everyone in this course.

03. About Us

A little bit about us. We are the husband and wife team behind Terminus. We're both recovering engineers, both actually mechanical engineering graduates from the University of Texas who kind of went down a little bit of an odd career path. I spent quite a few years in reservoir engineering in the oil and gas industry.
I spent quite a few years in the petrochemical industry
And we sort of from there, through various dark and twisty paths, found our way into software development and data science for our clients in the E&P industry, financial industry, as well as a couple of others. Terminus really tries to take a holistic view of helping organizations solve challenging problems with data-driven solutions, which can mean anything from building custom software to solve engineering problems, to constructing machine learning models, carrying out data science consulting, or generally just advising and providing some novel points of view on these organizations' most challenging problems. We have, over the course of that work, also build all kinds of software systems across many different languages, platforms, application areas and industries. So that's sort of the experience we have that goes into these courses.

04. Course Objectives For Your Boss

So the boring course objectives for your boss. Gain a working understanding of the Python Pandas library. You should be able to walk away from this course being able to write and maintain Pandas projects. Along with troubleshooting common issues and avoiding common pitfalls, using Pandas to load, view, manipulate, and save data. And understand when Pandas is and is not a good tool for your task. Lately, what we've seen in industry is that Pandas is the hammer and everyone's looking for a nail. Sometimes it makes sense. There are some really good applications that you can use Pandas for, but other times it really doesn't make a lot of sense. So we're going to be covering too, like, when do you use Pandas and then when do you use something else?

05. Your Role In This Course

Your job is just to learn. So please let us or our friends at SAGA Wisdom know if that's not happening for any reason. And we encourage you to enjoy this course. It's a short course. It's intended to be fun and not stressful. So take things at your own pace and don't hesitate to get in touch with any questions.

06. What You Need For This Course

What do you need for this course? A curiosity. A willingness to learn new programming tools and techniques. A desire to improve your programming skills or automate your normal tasks. And the ability to install Python, Pandas, Matplotlib, and Numpy. We'll show you how, if you don't know. You also need a text editor or an IDE. We've got a list of them here. You can pick your favorite. And here are some popular ones: Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, Notepad++, Vim, and Emacs, which we don't really talk about anymore. And this course, it's designed with a diverse audience in mind. I'll be using Notepad++ with some vanilla Python and just the Windows Command prompt.
You're welcome to use a Jupyter Notebook or a Python distribution like Anaconda. This course will work with those, but just keep in mind that these kind of tools tend to be a fad and they tend to go in and out of style. IDEs will probably look the same in 10 years, but we may repent the notebook. If for some reason you can't install an IDE or Python on your computer, you might be able to use the website below. Or there are also now a lot of different browsers and websites that let you run and write code, so check those out.
Yeah, especially if you may have some IT or, regulatory is not the word, corporate policy constraints which prevent you from being able to install software. We've really tried to choose a selection of tools for this course that is sort of a minimalist desert island programming approach. And that's for a couple of reasons: 1 is that's just our personal preference based on our experiences. But 2 is, that is actually the common denominator that you may have access to across a wide variety of environments, even if say, your IT department has your available software locked down pretty tightly. Hopefully, you can at least get the sort of the standard Python as distributed from the Python Foundation and you know some basic text editor like Notepad++ or Vim.
And with that, we'll see you in Lesson 1.02, where we'll talk a little bit about what Pandas is and the use cases where it applies.