<story><title>Project Python – Free Interactive Book That Introduces Python Programming and CS</title><url>http://projectpython.net/chapter00/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>znpy</author><text>In my humble opinion there really is no need for ANOTHER introductory book on python.&lt;p&gt;But there is a great, great need for REALLY well done books on intermediate python and advanced python.</text></comment>
<story><title>Project Python – Free Interactive Book That Introduces Python Programming and CS</title><url>http://projectpython.net/chapter00/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>treyfitty</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been trying to learn python for a while now, and I have a grasp of it in a similar way that I have a grasp of golf- I know what to do, but I&amp;#x27;m still missing a few fundamentals.&lt;p&gt;All these intro to X things seem to gloss over the high level stuff, but I&amp;#x27;ve hit a few walls in certain concepts that I just can&amp;#x27;t possibly Google.  Maybe HN could help me out:&lt;p&gt;take a pandas dataframe.  There&amp;#x27;s a .describe() method that I can chain to get the mean of the columns in the data frame grouped by var1:&lt;p&gt;df.groupby(df.var1).describe().mean&lt;p&gt;But then, there&amp;#x27;s also:&lt;p&gt;df.describe(df.var1).mean()&lt;p&gt;They largely do the same thing, but one gives me the mean across all variables, and the other one doesn&amp;#x27;t.&lt;p&gt;Now, how do I possibly Google this question?  One method has parentheses, the other doesn&amp;#x27;t.... but It&amp;#x27;s clear I&amp;#x27;m missing something fundamental here that I thought an intro online resource should address... but none do.</text></comment>