Pandas Workout: 200 Exercises to Make You a Stronger Data Analyst

Practice pandas with 200 focused exercises 🐼

Pandas Workout is built for readers who learn by solving problems. Instead of a tour of pandas methods, Reuven M. Lerner gives you 200 exercises that ask you to work directly with data: selecting rows and columns, cleaning inconsistencies, grouping records, joining tables, parsing strings and dates, and turning results into clear visualizations.

The book assumes you want to become more fluent with pandas for data analysis. Each exercise is a small task with a concrete goal, so you can test your approach, compare it with the solution, and carry the technique into your own datasets.

What the chapters cover 📊

The material moves through a logical progression:

• Series and data frames — the core structures and the operations that make them useful.
• Importing, exporting, and indexes — getting data in and out, and working with labeled access.
• Cleaning data — handling missing values, inconsistencies, and messy tables.
• Grouping, joining, and sorting — combining and summarizing datasets in flexible ways.
• Strings, dates, and times — parsing, formatting, and manipulating text and temporal data.
• Visualization and performance — presenting findings and making pandas code faster.

Projects that bring it together

Two larger projects break up the exercise sequence. The midway project and final project ask you to combine techniques from multiple chapters, which is where pandas starts to feel less like a collection of methods and more like a practical toolkit.

Who this book is for

Pandas Workout is aimed at data analysts and Python users who want stronger pandas skills through deliberate practice. If you already know some Python and want to become more confident with data manipulation, the exercise format gives you a structured way to build that confidence.

Why the workout approach works

Pandas has a wide API, and it is easy to forget techniques you have only read about. By turning each concept into a task, the book helps you build muscle memory: you select, transform, aggregate, and visualize data until the patterns become familiar. It is a practical way to strengthen the pandas skills that data analysis work demands.