pandas offers its users two choices to select a single column of data and that is with either brackets or dot notation. In this article, I suggest using the brackets and not dot notation for the following ten reasons.

1. Select column names with spaces
2. Select column names that have the same name as methods
3. Select columns with variables
4. Select non-string columns
5. Set new columns
6. Select multiple columns
7. Dot notation is a strict subset of the brackets
8. Use one way which works for all situations
9. ...

Video available

I also have a video from the Dunder Data YouTube channel where I demonstrate this entire process. I believe this is a post that is better viewed as a demonstration, so if you have the time see the video below.

Tutorial

A major pain point for beginners is writing too many lines of code in a single cell. When you are learning, you need to get feedback on every single line of code that you write and verify that it is in fact correct. Only once you have verified the...

In this article, I will discuss the overall approach I took to writing Pandas Cookbook along with highlights of each chapter.

New Book — Master Data Analysis with Python

I have a new book titled Master Data Analysis with Python that is far superior to Pandas Cookbook. It contains over 300 exercises and projects to reinforce all the material and will receive continuous updates indefinitely. If you are interested in Pandas Cookbook, I would strongly suggest to purchase Master...

In this post, I will offer my review of the book, Python for Data Analysis (2nd edition) by Wes McKinney. My name is Ted Petrou and I am an expert at pandas and author of the recently released Pandas Cookbook. I thoroughly read through PDA and created a very long, review that is available on github. This post provides some of the highlights from that full review.

What is a critical line-by-line review?

I read this book as if I was the only technical reviewer and I was...

This is the fourth and final part of the series “Selecting Subsets of Data in Pandas”. Pandas offers a wide variety of options for subset selection, which necessitates multiple articles. This series is broken down into the following topics.

1. Selection with [], .loc and .iloc
2. Boolean indexing
3. Assigning subsets of data
4. How NOT to select subsets of data

Become an Expert

If you want to be trusted to make decisions using pandas and scikit-learn, you must become an...