A Python Pandas Coding Meetup

On October, 12th, I organised a local meetup event at the Department of Geography. We had around 15 attendees, both from Tartu industry and university students.

In this meetup we played with the Jupyter Notebook (http://jupyter.org/) and did some data wrangling with Python, Pandas (http://pandas.pydata.org/) and co., some data analysis and visualisation.

I presented on how we can use Miniconda, an encapsulated versatile virtual python environment installer, that works under the hood of the big Anaconda python distribution. Miniconda is basically a mini version of Anaconda that includes only the conda package manager and its dependencies. We used a Python version 3.4 because some of the libraries/tools we wanted to work with supposedly only are supported up to Python 3.4. Here it becomes obvious how practical virtual environments can be. They help you to keep various Python versions around without messing up your system.

After we had set-up our local Python working environment, I introduced the Jupyter Notebook. The Jupyter Notebook is an open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text. Uses include: data cleaning and transformation, numerical simulation, statistical modeling, data visualization, machine learning, and much more.

I prepared a variety of resources that we worked through in the meetup. I shared the collated tutorials and course materials on my GitHub account, The repository contains a curated collection of Jupyter Notebooks of introductory materials about programming in Python in general, the Pandas data manipulation and visualisation toolkit, and the Geopandas geospatial library.

This repository aims at different degrees of experience with the Python programming language and Python data manipultation and visualisation libraries. Each folder contains a README.md (for the the online repository) and README.notebook.md (readme as readable Notebook) file that list the contents and some details for each of the 3 big modules here:

• 01 - Introduction to Python and the Jupyter Notebook
• 02 - Introduction to the Pandas library
• 03 - Introduction to the Geopandas library

In order to get started, download the full Meetup-Repositiry from https://github.com/allixender/meetup-notes/archive/master.zip and extract it to a LOCAL folder. Go back into the console/commandline prompt and change into that folder. There you should then start the Jupyter notebook.