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Pandas 101 (Introduction)

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What is Pandas?      Pandas  is a  software library  written for the  Python programming language  for data manipulation and  analysis . In particular, it offers  data structures  and operations for manipulating numerical tables and  time series . It is  free software  released under the  three-clause BSD license .  The name is derived from the term " panel data ", an  econometrics  term for  data sets  that include observations over multiple time periods for the same individuals.  Its name is a play on the phrase "Python data analysis" itself.   Wes McKinney  started building what would become pandas at  AQR Capital  while he was a researcher there from 2007 to 2010. Library Highlights A fast and efficient  DataFrame  object for data manipulation with integrated indexing; Tools for  reading and writing data  between in-memory data structures and different formats: CSV and text files, Microsoft Excel, SQL databases, and the fast HDF5 format; Intelligent  data alignm