


Why is Python a great language choice for data tasks?



How did Python become so widely used for working with data?




Data inspiration

Sometimes you just need to see it to understand how data analysis, visualization and storytelling can intersect in a meaningful way. The following resources do a great job of telling stories with data. There are more links to stories listed on the data analysis and data visualization pages.

Example data sets

Looking for freely-available data to use in your projects but aren't sure where to get it? The following links have large free, open data sets.

  • Check out the awesome public datasets project repository for data in many different categories ranging from finance to museums.

  • Kickstarter datasets are scraped JSON and CSV structured monthly data from Kickstarter projects.

  • Data is Plural is a weekly newsletter that highlights open data that you can use for your projects. I have been a subscriber to the newsletter for a couple of years now and love seeing the wide variety of data sources that are freely available.

  • Data analysis and machine learning projects provides more than just the data, it also includes instructions and code for working with the data in your own development environment.

General Python data resources

What else would you like to learn about Python and data?

Tell me about standard relational databases.

What're these NoSQL data stores hipster developers keep talking about?

Why is Python a good programming language to use?

Matt Makai 2012-2020