Preface Preface
A Brief History of This Book.
The original version of this book was developed for the Certificate of Data Science program at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies by the original author, Dr. Jeffrey Stanton. The original authors thanked Ashish Verma for help with revisions to the chapter on Twitter (now X). A PDF version of version 3 of this book and code examples used in version 3 of the book were once available at: http://jsresearch.net/wiki/projects/teachdatascience. These were forked by Dr. Jan Pearce to create a previous version of this book which was used in the summer of 2020 to teach on online Introduction to Data Science course at Berea College. The Runestone version of this book was created in 2025.
The material provided in this book is provided "as is" with no warranty or guarantees with respect to its accuracy or suitability for any purpose.
Data Science: Many Skills.
Data Science refers to an emerging area of work concerned with the collection, preparation, analysis, visualization, management, and preservation of large collections of information. Although the name Data Science seems to connect most strongly with areas such as databases and computer science, many different kinds of skills including non-mathematical skills are needed.
