welcome
Thank you for purchasing the MEAP for Effective Data Analysis. I hope this book will be of immediate use to you in your work as an analyst. With your help, the final book will be a tool for you to accelerate your career in data analytics, data science, and more.
Early in my career in research and analytics, I discovered a large gap between the technical skills I was taught (statistics, R, SPSS, SQL, etc.) and the delivery of a final product that provides tangible, actionable recommendations to my stakeholders. Like many junior analysts, I learned through trial and error, with many failed deliverables I recreated until they were understood by the team who requested them.
With some amazing mentors, I grew in my capacity as a data scientist and a data analyst, eventually growing into a leadership role. Along the way, I sought to support and mentor others who were early in their career, discovering many of them shared the same struggles that I once did. This book is my intention to put that mentorship to paper and create a definitive set of resources for you to maximize your contribution and value in analytics while growing your career.
This book is written assuming you have most or all of the following foundational skills of analytics:
- Knowledge of relational databases and how to query them with SQL
- Knowledge of univariate parametric statistical tests (e.g., t-tests, ANOVAs, linear regression)
- Knowledge of Python (pandas, matplotlib, seaborn, numpy)