The Alt-Ac Job Beat Newsletter Post 16 - python book is out

Hi Everyone,

For a bit of shameless promotion, I have self-published a book, Data Science for Crime Analysis with Python. You can purchase the book (either an epub or a paperback copy), on my website at https://crimede-coder.com/store. See the end of this post for the front matter and the first two chapters.

The main motivation for the book is I wanted to write a book that goes beyond basic "how to write python code". It of course has examples of that, but I wanted to include many things not typically included in entry level texts, but are crucial to being able to use python for real life projects. These include:

• how to set up python environments
• how to organize your code into files and functions
• how it all looks/works together in a single project

The title of the book is oriented towards crime analysts, but these are the same skills needed for current PhD students who want to prepare for a private sector role as well. (It has the usual python basics, pandas/numpy, matplotlib, jupyter notebooks, and a chapter on using SQL + python together. So the typical data scientific stack minus machine learning.)

I did not have a general recommendation for students to learn python I was happy with. So I wrote this book for criminology students and crime analysts to get started with python.

Best, Andy Wheeler

Here is a preview of the first two chapters (if on a phone, you can view the PDF directly here):