readme.txt

First and foremost, this was a lot of fun. I was pleasantly surprised about how much Python I could learn in 24 hours. Now I understand why I was always told that Python was great for science/big data, because of all the functionality that libraries like numpy and scipy add. I actually somewhat preferred the syntax to Ruby, as you don’t get mixed up as to wither or not you have too many ENDs, and Python’s indention forces you to keep your code looking pretty neat. 

My goal was to accomplish this in 24 hours, and as I stated earlier I’m pretty happy about the result. Mean/Median were pretty simple to find, it was really just a syntax thing (switching from Ruby to Python), however, Mode was tricky since my method simply returned the entire array if there was no mode, but finally I figured out an if/else to check it against the length of the entire array. 

It seems like the libraries in Python function similar to gems in Ruby, I’ll need to look at that more. I was able to calculate two of the three bonus questions (variance and standard deviation) and if I allowed myself some more time to dig into stats, I think I could have eventually calculated the z-score (Note in my code I have some code commented out re: z-score) My other shortcoming I believe was in the data binning, I seemed to be almost there but not quite as it seems like there are multiply ways to bin data in Python (using different libraries, etc.)

 If I where to continue refactoring, I think I could clean up the mode method as well as create methods for all the numpy stuff. 

Thanks again for a fun programming exercise!


PS…You should not need anything to run my python program, just ‘python problem3.py’ in your terminal.