100 Followers
65 Following
arbieroo

Arbie's Unoriginally Titled Book Blog

It's a blog! Mainly of book reviews.

Currently reading

Station Zero
Philip Reeve
Progress: 220/282 pages
The Books of Earthsea: The Complete Illustrated Edition
Ursula K. Le Guin, Charles Vess
Progress: 749/997 pages
The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry
Robert Chandler
The Uncertain Land and Other Poems
Patrick O'Brian
Progress: 8/160 pages
The Heptameron (Penguin Classics)
Marguerite de Navarre
Progress: 152/544 pages
The Poems and Plays of John Masefield
John Masefield
Progress: 78/534 pages
Poems Selected
Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes
Progress: 4/50 pages
Selected Poems
U A Fanthorpe
Progress: 18/160 pages
The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse
Mick Imlah, Robert Crawford
Hainish Novels & Stories, Vol. 2
Ursula K. Le Guin
Progress: 133/789 pages

Python Data Analytics

Python Data Analytics - Fabio Nelli

This book is not terrible but it could have been a lot better. The English is poor (the author is Italian, I think - certainly not a native English speaker, anyway) which makes it harder to follow what's going on - though not impossible. But here's the real problem; I am still spending more time looking things up online than in either of the two books on Python I have. This, to me, means they can't be good. By contrast, Mastering Matlab 7 by Duane C. Hanselman and Bruce Littlefield, is excellent and my copy is showing signs of imminent collapse through heavy use.

 

What's the difference? Total information content and it's presentation. The Matlab book contains vastly more info and much of it is concentrated in tables. My copy has a profusion of little post-it notes marking pages with reference tables that I use frequently. These are conspicuous by their absence in Python Data Analytics, except in the case of a  comprehensive appendix on Latex codes for use in plot annotation.

 

My search for a decent Python/SciKit reference goes on.