We are becoming awash in the flood of digital data from scientific research, engineering, economics, politics, journalism, business, and many other domains. As a result, analyzing, visualizing, and harnessing data is the occupation of an increasingly large and diverse set of people. Quantitative skills such as programming, numerical computing, mathematics, statistics, and data mining, which form the core of data science, are more and more appreciated in a seemingly endless plethora of fields.

Python, a widely-known programming language, is also one of the leading open platforms for data science. IPython is a mature Python project that provides scientist-friendly interactive access to Python. It is part of the broader Project Jupyter, which aims to provide high-quality environments for interactive computing, data analysis, visualization, and the authoring of interactive scientific documents. Jupyter is estimated to have several million users today.

The prequel of this book, Learning IPython for Interactive Computing and Data Visualization Second Edition, Packt Publishing was published in 2015, two years after the first edition. It is a beginner-level introduction to data science and numerical computing with Python, IPython, and Jupyter.

This book, the first edition of which was published in 2014, continues that journey by presenting more than 100 recipes for interactive scientific computing and data science. These recipes not only cover programming topics such as numerical computing, high-performance computing, parallel computing, and interactive visualization, but also data analysis topics such as statistics, data mining, machine learning, signal processing, graph theory, numerical optimization, and many others.

This second edition is fully compatible with the latest versions of the platform and its libraries. It includes new recipes to better leverage the latest features of Python 3, and it introduces promising new projects such as JupyterLab, Altair, and Dask.