Query: Getting Information from Data With the Wolfram Language

Mathematica and the Wolfram Language provide an integrated environment for sophisticated programming, making them the ideal tools for calculus, data visualization, machine learning, and more. But how about using Wolfram as the linchpin for organizing data? In this book, Professor Seth J. Chandler, an award-winning, 30-year user of the Wolfram Language, guides intermediate users from simple cases to data in the wild and shows how each can be fed into the full range of Wolfram Language functionality. It's both a conceptual and practical approach filled with annotated examples.

Want to know more about associations or the organization and presentation of datasets? This book shows how it's done. Want to organize or reduce data in the Wolfram Language similarly to the way one might use SQL, pandas in Python, or dplyr in R's tidyverse? This book shows how to simplify data processing and go beyond what is possible with other tools using the Query function. It also explores how to import information from the places real-world data is most likely to be found: CSV, Excel, or JSON files.

Use Query both as a tutorial and as a reference. Read it cover-to-cover doing the exercises or dip in to look up specific data-wrangling tasks. Augmenting the underlying power of the Wolfram Language with the techniques taught in this book puts you at the forefront of innovative data analysis.

Seth J. Chandler is a Law Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center (UHLC). He maintains a dual life as a law professor, teaching subjects such as constitutional law and insurance law, and as an expert on the Wolfram Language, presenting at numerous Wolfram conferences and winning a Wolfram Innovator Award in 2011. He has combined both of his passions in the course Analytic Methods for Lawyers, which is taught at UHLC and is available via his YouTube channel (@sethjchandler). He has made many contributions to the Wolfram Demonstrations Project, Function Repository, and Data Repository and to Wolfram Community. Professor Chandler received his undergraduate degree in 1979 from Princeton University and his Juris Doctorate in 1983 from Harvard Law School, where he served as Managing Editor of the Harvard Law Review. His knowledge of math and of the Wolfram Language is generally self-taught, much of it from listening to and reading the works of Stephen Wolfram and others. He has never taken a college-level programming course; the last math course on his transcript is a linear algebra class from 1975.