New books and podcasts!

New Books

Just got Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic in the mail. 
Storytelling with Data

The first line of the introduction is a quote from Yale Professor Emeritus Edward Tufte: "Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely." Wired magazine 2003

 This book is focused on everything that goes into conveying information inside your organization. It can be difficult working across teams. I have found you really need to know your audience to create the most effective visualization. Many times I have created what I thought was a great visualization with an obvious trend or insight only to get the response, "What is this this telling me?". Or "I just want to know xyz.". Similarly, there are time when I present a simple graph which spurs a series of questions that get's to what the stakeholder's REAL question was all along. 

 Also that quote for Tufte makes me want to revisit some of his work. He actually teaches one-day courses in Massachusetts which anyone can attend. I will be adding some of his books to my reading list for the year.
Four texts by Tufte

I also purchased Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: A Pragmatic Guide to Learning Programming Languages by Bruce A. Tate. 
7 Languages in 7 Weeks

 I've programmed in 5 different languages but feel like I never really payed much attention to language structure before my Python journey. They say you should learn a new programming language every year, so seven is 7x as good right?
As for what I have already been reading, I am a few chapters into Fluent Python and it is interesting, if a little dry. There have been some fun tidbits like Lundh's Lambda Refactoring Rule which reminded me that brevity itself is not always best:
If you find a piece of code hard to understand try this refactoring procedure:
  1. Write a comment explaining what the heck that lambda expression does.
  2. Study the comment for a while and thing of a new name that matches the comment
  3. Convert the lambda to a def statement, using that name
  4. Remove the comment.


Lots of deep dives into data structure, class attributes and a whole section on dictionaries and sets.

New Podcasts

If you listen to podcasts I recommend Talk Python To Me. Their two year-end podcasts: Data Science Year in Review 2018 Edition and Python Year in Review 2018 Edition are both great listens. A couple things they mentioned that sound interesting:

  • Google Dataset Search
  • Python2 end of life clock
    • Reminded me that 2020 is coming up sooner than I thought. Will be posting a python 2.7 to python 3.7 migration in the coming months :)
    • Python 3.7 is the first Python3 release that is faster on every benchmark than Python2. No excuses to not switch now.

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