Have you ever needed to pull the first record of a dataset? What about the last, or maybe even the seventeenth? This is called indexing. There’s a lot of data out there, and indexing gives us a set of rules to extract by position. Except… not every program indexes ...

In an earlier post I offered a tour of RStudio, the popular integrated development environment and my preferred interface for teaching R. With Python, I favor Jupyter notebooks so figured a similar tour would be worth it. This post lays out the basics of Jupyter, how to navigate the interface, ...

Technical publishers are an interesting case study. With most trade books, readers hardly know or are concerned with the publisher. There might be a tiny penguin or house on the corner of the cover, but that’s the only marking. By contrast, you can usually tell the publisher of a ...

The Clark’s Nutcracker has landed! That’s the bird on the cover of Advancing into Analytics, copies of which I received the other day. There’s that new author enthusiasm! You can now get your digital or paperback copy too at your bookseller of choice. Learn more about the ...

When many hear “data analytics” these days, they think of graphical user interface (GUI)-driven business intelligence (e.g. Tableau), data warehousing (e.g. Snowflake), or data preparation (e.g. Alteryx) platforms. These tools have their place (some more than others) in the analytics stack. But rather than focus on ...

Technical books are curious in a lot of ways, including this one: most technical authors don’t typically teach or write for a living. They’re technicians who happen to write a book. That means that while you may get the most brilliant technical know-how, you may not receive it ...

Excel is arguably the world’s largest coding community, with 750 million users worldwide. Many of us, myself included, get introduced to the data world from Excel. But the thing is… Excel is not coding, not exactly. Like any software, Excel has its limitations, which a full-borne programming language like R ...

I usually stay away from the “next big thing:” I’ve never logged into TikTok, and don’t get me started about the trendy restaurants here in Cleveland (I don’t find writing my own hot dog order on a clipboard fun or amusing.). However, I wasn’t able to ...