Congratulations! You’ve made it halfway through this book. If you’ve been doing the exercises, I hope you’ve found your pandas skills improving, little by little. (And if you opened the book to this chapter without doing the exercises first, shame on you!)
Are you forgetting some of the syntax, method names, and parameter names? Are you making frustrating, “stupid” mistakes? That’s only natural, and it happens to everyone, no matter how long they’ve been using pandas or any other large software library. Over time, though, it will become more natural and more obvious, at least when using the functionality that’s most common in your work.
The whole point of this book is to gain experience and fluency through practice. Such gains happen incrementally and over time. But they do happen, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.
In this chapter, we’re taking a break from exercises that concentrate on particular topics and themes. Instead, I’m going to ask you to do a small project that requires you to use many of the parts of pandas that you’ve learned about in the last few chapters. I hope this project gives you a chance to integrate the different skills you’ve learned so far.