A blog post that I think many of you will find interesting. http://www.drbunsen.org/explorations-in-unix.html
"Few tools are more indispensable to my work than Unix. Manipulating data into different formats, performing transformations, and conducting exploratory data analysis (EDA) is the lingua franca of data science.1 The coffers of Unix hold many simple tools, which by themselves are powerful, but when chained together facilitate complex data manipulations. Unix's use of functional composition eliminates much of the tedious boilerplate of I/0 and text parsing found in scripting languages. This design creates a simple and succinct interface for manipulating data and a foundation upon which custom tools can be built. Although languages like R and Python are invaluable for data analysis, I find Unix to be superior in many scenarios for quick and simple data cleaning, idea prototyping, and understanding data. This post is about how I use Unix for EDA. Inspect Reshape Enumerate Describe Visualize" Scott -- R. Scott Granneman [email protected] ~ www.granneman.com ~ granneman.tel Full list of publications @ http://www.granneman.com/publications My latest book: Mac OS X for Power Users @ http://www.granneman.com/books “He is winding the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.” ---Shakespeare -- Central West End Linux Users Group (via Google Groups) Main page: http://www.cwelug.org To post: [email protected] To subscribe: [email protected] To unsubscribe: [email protected] More options: http://groups.google.com/group/cwelug
