Data Science Field Guide

By Nico Preston, PhD (2023 | Copyleft | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

This is a field guide to software with installation notes and scripts for getting started in data science.

What's a Field Guide?

When classifying organisms in nature:

"A field guide helps identify your subject, compare among those within a category, and distinguish between seemingly similar options" (Unknown)

This quote relays what I hope to convey through this guide. I was inspired as a young disease ecologist by ecosystem guides that included not only the organisms themselves but their broader ecology, seasonality, functional role, connectedness to other organisms, and spatiotemporal distribution. These analogies hold for picking your technology; indeed, a data scientist requires an ecosystem of interoperable tools.