Principles of Data Wrangling: Practical Techniques for Data Preparation

by Tye Rattenbury

A key task that any aspiring data-driven organization needs to learn is data wrangling, the process of converting raw data into something truly useful. This practical guide provides business analysts with an overview of various data wrangling techniques and tools, and puts the practice of data wrangling into context by asking, What are you trying to do and why?

Wrangling data consumes roughly 50-80% of an analyst's time before any kind of analysis is possible. Written by key executives at Trifacta, this book walks you through the wrangling process by exploring several factors--time, granularity, scope, and structure--that you need to consider as you begin to work with data. You'll learn a shared language and a comprehensive understanding of data wrangling, with an emphasis on recent agile analytic processes used by many of today's data-driven organizations.

Appreciate the importance--and the satisfaction--of wrangling data the right way.


Understand what kind of data is available
Choose which data to use and at what level of detail
Meaningfully combine multiple sources of data
Decide how to distill the results to a size and shape that can drive downstream analysis

94 pages, ebook

Published June 29, 2017

Reviews

[Rahul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was mainly looking for the steps that go into the ETL process and this book gave a nice overview of that. It went through the steps that the data has to go through and the operations that any data wrangler tool must be capable of performing. Note that it doesn't have any information on how any of the steps must be performed in any detail, it just states that these are the steps in general and that's it. And that's what I was looking for.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great overview of common wrangling tasks associated with many data projects.