By Max Humber
Introduction
This book is about Python and personal finance and how you can effectively mix the two together. It is a crash course on how deal with data, how to build up financial formulas in code from scratch, and how to evaluate and think about money in your day-to-day life.
Although each chapter is driven by an idea in personal finance, this book is not an exhaustive compendium on the topic. I try to provide just enough theory in each chapter to get you going, but I made a conscious effort to abstract away and hide a lot of the math so that we don’t get stuck in the weeds.
If I’m being completely honest with you (and myself), this book is my love letter to pandas, 1 the main data manipulation library in Python. pandas is a wonderful tool and has become the bedrock on top of which a lot (if not most) machine learning is built. If you get good at pandas (and this book should help!), you will be well positioned to dive into the world of machine learning. But if machine learning isn’t your thing, don’t worry, I promise that you can still get a lot of value out of this book.