Manipulating Data with the Pandas Library

In the next few portions of the book, we are going to get our hands dirty by building the various kinds of recommender systems that were introduced in chapter one. However, before we do so, it is important that we know how to handle, manipulate, and analyze data efficiently in Python.

The datasets we'll be working with will be several megabytes in size. Historically, Python has never been well-known for its speed of execution. Therefore, analyzing such huge amounts of data using vanilla Python and the built-in data structures it provides us is simply impossible.

In this chapter, we're going to get ourselves acquainted with the pandas library, which aims to overcome the aforementioned limitations, making data analysis in Python extremely efficient and user-friendly. We'll also introduce ourselves to the Movies Dataset that we're going to use to build our recommenders as well as use pandas to extract some interesting facts and narrate the history of movies using data.