Data Science Handbook

Practical, accessible guide to becoming a data scientist, updated to include the latest advances in data science and related fields.

Becoming a data scientist is hard. The job focuses on mathematical tools, but also demands fluency with software engineering, understanding of a business situation, and deep understanding of the data itself. This book provides a crash course in data science, combining all the necessary skills into a unified discipline.

The focus of The Data Science Handbook is on practical applications and the ability to solve real problems, rather than theoretical formalisms that are rarely needed in practice. Among its key points are:

• An emphasis on software engineering and coding skills, which play a significant role in most real data science problems.
• Extensive sample code, detailed discussions of important libraries, and a solid grounding in core concepts from computer science (computer architecture, runtime complexity, and programming paradigms).
• A broad overview of important mathematical tools, including classical techniques in statistics, stochastic modeling, regression, numerical optimization, and more.
• Extensive tips about the practical realities of working as a data scientist, including understanding related jobs functions, project life cycles, and the varying roles of data science in an organization.
• Exactly the right amount of theory. A solid conceptual foundation is required for fitting the right model to a business problem, understanding a tool’s limitations, and reasoning about discoveries.

Data science is a quickly evolving field, and this 2nd edition has been updated to reflect the latest developments, including the revolution in AI that has come from Large Language Models and the growth of ML Engineering as its own discipline. Much of data science has become a skillset that anybody can have, making this book not only for aspiring data scientists, but also for professionals in other fields who want to use analytics as a force multiplier in their organization.

Field Cady is a data scientist, researcher and author based in Seattle, WA, USA. He has worked for a range of companies including Google, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and several startups. He received a BS in physics and math from Stanford and did graduate work computer science at Carnegie Mellon. He is the author of The Data Science Handbook (Wiley 2017).