Marc Wintjen is the author of the book Practical Data Analysis Using Jupyter Notebook, we got the chance to sit down with him and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.
Q: How long did it take you to write the book?
Marc: About 9 months with help and plenty of edits along the way.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Marc: I enjoy research and learning new things so I’m not sure how to quantify the total time spent but each chapter had specific deadlines so I would spend hours and days investigating how I would present the content. It was fun to explore new features available in each Python library and then come up with reusable techniques to teach anyone how to up skill working with data.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Marc: Absolutely – the biggest was the pandemic and how it deflated my motivation to finish the book. Being a data guy, I knew early from looking at the growth in cases that many people around the world suffer. The concept of “”flattening the curve”” became main stream and my heartfelt condolences go out to everyone who have suffered. I was fortunate enough to shift my focus on working with data to help people understand the Covid-19 data in Chapter 9. I found that changing the content to help others understand the data helped inspire me to finish my chapter and the rest of the book.
Q: What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?
Marc: What is old is new again. Working with data has been around for decades and the tools available today have significantly reduced the time to analyze data. Be open to learning traditional best practices and adaptive to using modern libraries to help you answer questions.
Q. How do you keep up-to-date on your tech?
Marc: My advice from a friend was to keep swimming when it comes to technology so be open to learning. As long as my passion for working with data continues, it will never be a burden.
Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?
Marc: No but please check out my Linkedin Page for postings https://www.linkedin.com/in/mwintjen/
Q. Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?
Marc: There are numerious references throughout my book but here are a few: https://jupyter.org/ , https://www.python.org/ , http://www.nltk.org/
You can find Marc’s book on Amazon by following this link: Click here!
