Brandon Rhodes penned a nice, light, practical introduction to Pandas while using “small” data:
I will admit it: I only thought to pull out Pandas when my Python script was nearly complete, because running print on a Pandas data frame would save me the trouble of formatting 12 rows of data by hand.
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This post is a brief tour of the final script, written up as an IPython notebook and organized around five basic lessons that I learned about Pandas by applying it to this problem.