I remember when I first got into Python and heard about Anaconda. It wasn’t really clear to me if Anaconda was a “dialect” of Python code, a really awesome suite of tools for working with Python, or something else. Turns out that Anaconda is first and foremost a distribution ...

I remember my first days of coding R: I would search around for how to do X task, and find out that Y package would be really helpful. But that led to more questions: What are packages in the first place, and how do you use them? In this post, ...

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 ...