Python book for Data science?

[Dave Hyer]

Hello,

I found an old thread looking for a promo code. After getting the email regarding this lovely book.

I am getting interested web scraping for data science work. I am now just reading your book on your website and loving it. It seems so fitted to the work vs. Java.

Do you see any specialized Pythons books in the future?

I am loving this approach as I am not a programmer by trade, more of a support monkey. I need to learn how to program and think Python would be better to learn than Java for data mining/web scraping.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Dave

[Al Sweigart]

Hi Dave. I've written four books now, and I keep telling myself that I'm going to stop writing them and instead focus on software or other projects that I've been putting off. But I'm not planning on any more Python books for now; I think a lot of other people smarter than me have already written them.

What topics would you like to see covered in a book format?

I do plan on writing one more book on MIT's Scratch, a programming education tool for kids at https://scratch.mit.edu

[Dave Hyer]

Hello Al,

Thanks for getting back to me. I apologize for being a bit of a huge cynic not expecting an answer. But you did!! And proved me totally wrong. So please accept my apology!!!

I did go to https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ and did a quick look over the other books you have penned. I like the cyber security one, being a bit of a closet hacker.

And if you are going to do just the one more book for kids, then I would not suggest another topic. BUT if you would consider it, maybe you could do something on data mining and visualization. There are a few books out there already, but in the style of this book, I think many of use aspiring to get into data science would be very grateful.

PS, any promo codes lying around?? ;)

Thanks again for a great book. I am reading it on line until payday when I can look to buy it.

Take it easy,
Dave

[Al Sweigart]

Thanks Dave! The crypto book doesn't cover any modern ciphers (except for a textbook implementation of RSA in the last couple of chapters). I was really inspired by "The Cryptoclub" textbook for kids and thought it'd be great to extend it to use programming for the implementations.

Data visualization seems to be a hot topic, though I'm not sure how well Python since the front-end seems to be browser-based (putting it in JavaScript's domain). Though some kind of Python module for generating JavaScript D3 visualizations might be nice. I think that's the aim of this project https://pypi.python.org/pypi/vincent/0.1.4 but it hasn't been updated in a couple years.

I'll take a look into it.

No promo codes unfortunately, though you might be able to snag a free book from this CodeRanch by making on-topics posts on this book this week.

[Iria Nikitin]

Hello,
I want to start making a website using scraping.humidificadoresNikitin
I have knowledge of python and am hesitating to learn Java for scraping. What language do you recommend Java or Python to make the web?
Thanks a lot
Iria

[Ishan Shah]

Hello,
The Open Source Data Science Masters has a great curriculum. It has book recommendations as well as courses.

I hope this will help you