Preface

Pandas Brain Teasers — by Miki Tebeka (3 / 34)

👈 Acknowledgments | TOC | About the Author 👉

Pandas is a great library. I have used it in many projects, and it always delivers. Like any big project, the Pandas developers had to make some design decisions that at times seem surprising. This book uses these quirks as a teaching opportunity. By understanding the gaps in your knowledge, you’ll become better at what you do.

There’s a lot of research showing that people who make mistakes during the learning process learn better than people who don’t. If you use this approach when fixing bugs, you’ll find you enjoy bug hunting more and become a better developer after each bug you fix.

These teasers will help you avoid mistakes. Some of the teasers are from my own experience shipping bugs to production and some are from others doing the same.

Teasers are fun! We geeks love to solve puzzles. You can also use these teasers to impress your coworkers, have knowledge competitions, and become better together.

Many of these brain teasers are from quizzes I gave at conferences and meetups. I’ve found that people highly enjoy them, and they tend to liven up the room.

At the beginning of each chapter, I’ll show you a short Python program with Pandas code in it and ask you to guess the output. These are the possible answers:

• Syntax error
• Exception