Data Science for Newbies: An Introductory Tutorial Series for Software Engineers

Editor's note: This is an overview of a multi-part tutorial on data science for newbies. The author has given the series a different -- tongue-in-cheek -- title; take it in stride and recognize that the series' approach and content is a fresh look at getting started with various aspects of data science from a software engineering perspective. To do some serious statistics with Python one should use a proper distribution like the one provided by Continuum Analytics. Of course, a manual installation of all the needed packages (Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib etc.) is possible but beware the complexities and convoluted package dependencies. The installation under Windows is straightforward but avoid the usage of multiple Python installations (for example, Python3 and Python2 in parallel).