Chapter 1. Programming and Data Science – A New Toolset

"Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves."

– Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee)

In this introductory chapter, I'll start the conversation by attempting to answer a few fundamental questions that will hopefully provide context and clarity for the rest of this book:

• What is data science and why it's on the rise
• Why is data science here to stay
• Why do developers need to get involved in data science

Using my experience as a developer and recent data science practitioner, I'll then discuss a concrete data pipeline project that I worked on and a data science strategy that derived from this work, which is comprised of three pillars: data, services, and tools. I'll end the chapter by introducing Jupyter Notebooks which are at the center of the solution I'm proposing in this book.