I had the privilege of speaking last night at the NYCPython meetup group. I've given tons of "use pandas!" talks so I thought I would take a slightly different angle and talk about some of the design and implementation work that I've done for getting good performance in critical data manipulations. I'll turn some of this material into some blog articles in the near future.
Wes McKinney: pandas design and development from Adam Klein on Vimeo.
Here's some more video footable shot by my awesome friend Emily Paup with her HDSLR.
I did a little interactive demo (using the ever-amazing IPython HTML Notebook) on Ashley Williams's Food Nutrient JSON Database:
If you want to run the code in the IPython notebook, you'll have to download the food database file above.
The audience and I learned from this demo that if you're after Tryptophan, "Sea lion, Steller, meat with fat (Alaska Native)" is where to get it (in the highest density).