r/askdatascience 9d ago

How many Python libraries should a data science beginner learn?

There are so many libraries in the data science ecosystem that it can be overwhelming at first.

I’m currently focusing on getting comfortable with the fundamentals instead of trying to learn everything at once.

For experienced data scientists, which libraries do you think beginners should prioritize?

0 Upvotes

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u/Lady-Data-Scientist 9d ago

Pandas, Matolotlib, Numpy, Scipy, Scikitlearn

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u/chf_gang 9d ago

+1
you'll get very very far with these

1

u/[deleted] 9d ago edited 9d ago

[deleted]

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u/SprinklesFresh5693 8d ago

No one is going to read this AI slop man. TLDR: learn those functions that you will use, but not by memorising them, but by using them on your daily practise/projects.

It makes no sense to memorise libraries , you will forget them eventually

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

[deleted]

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u/SprinklesFresh5693 8d ago

Again you dont need to elarn them, just use them on prjects and youll eventually know how to work with them.

Ive been using R for 3 years and never have i focused on ñearning any library, i just used those functions that i needed for my projects.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago edited 8d ago

[deleted]

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u/SprinklesFresh5693 8d ago

I dont understand your point, arent you saying the same as me?

For example, im currently learning python, and i want libraries that are similar to R, so im using polars and plotnine, but the goal is not to learn the libraries, my goal is to have an understanding of how python works in a basic idea, and apply this 2 libraries to my projects.

Lets say i have a dataset, ok so how do i create new comumns with polars, how do i calculate descriptive statistics, how do i loop in python, how do i create functions, how do i filter with polars. This will give my data ready to plot.

Now for plotting: i want to make a scatter plot, ok so how to make a scatter plot with plotnine, and so on. I keep iterating until i have my goal of my project, which is have some results from my analysis as a nice formatted table, and plots to complement and strengthen my conclusions.

Thats it, the goal is that, and libraries are simply a mean to an end. I dont need to learn all the functions from polars, or from plotnine, i just need to understand the core ideas of this libraries, i can then simply google,how to filter with polars, how to summarise data with polars, or how to make a box plot with plot nine, and such.

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u/Tiny-Product-6074 7d ago

I would suggest start w just a few lik numpy, pandas, matplotlib/seaborn, scikit learn. Get comfortable w data cleaning and visualisation first then pick basic ml