Pandas is not a Python library, really, it is a DSL for vectorized ETL work. Like any language you have to learn the idioms. Pandas is the swiss army knife of

Pandas is not a Python library, really, it is a DSL for vectorized ETL work. Like any language you have to learn the idioms. Pandas is the swiss army knife of data science prep work. There are very few things it can't do. But to achieve that flexibility, it has a very complex API. That can be confusing when starting out. A lot of beginner work feels like just memorizing arbitrary recipes. Once you understand it, it becomes much more powerful. When I first started, the gratuitous use of nested square brackets drove me crazy. Now I understand what's happening beneath the hood, and I use that expressive power on a daily basis. The critiques of memory usage are well founded and hopefully the underlying tech implementations continue to improve over time.