In this video, we will learn about some of the languages relevant to the work of data professionals. These can be categorized as –query languages, programming languages, and shell scripting. Having proficiency in at leastone language in each category is essential forany data professional. Simply stated: Query languagesare designed for accessing and manipulating data in a database; for example, SQL Programming languages are designed for developing applications and controlling application behavior; for example, Python, R, and Java; and Shell and Scripting languages, such as Unix/Linux Shell, and PowerShell, are ideal for repetitive and time-consuming operational tasks. In the remaining video, we will examine these languages in greater depth. SQL, or Structured Query Language, is a querying language designed for accessing and manipulating information from, mostly, though not exclusively, relational databases. Using SQL, we can write a set of instructions to perform operations such as Insert, update, and delete records in a database; Create new databases, tables, and views; and Write stored procedures—which means you can write a set of instructions and call them for later use Here are some advantages of using SQL— SQL is portable and can be used independent of the platform It can be used for querying data in a wide variety of databases and data repositories, although each vendor may have some variations and special extensions. It has a simple syntax that is similar to the English language Its syntax allows developers to write programs with fewer lines than some of the other programming languagesusing basic keywords such as select, insert, into, and update. It can retrieve large amountsof data quickly and efficiently. It runs on an interpreter system, which means code can be executed as soon as it is written, making prototyping quick and easy. SQL is one of the most popular querying language. Due to its large user community and the sheer volume of documentation accumulated over the years, it continues to provide a uniform platform, worldwide, to all its users. Python is a widely-used open-source, general-purpose, high-level programming language. Its syntax allows programmers to express their concepts in fewer lines of code, as compared to some of the older languages. Python is perceived as one of the easiest languages to learn and has a large developer community. Because of its focus on simplicity and readability, and a low learning curve, it’s an ideal tool for beginning programmers. It is great for performing high-computational tasks in vast amounts of data, which can otherwise be extremely time-consuming and cumbersome. Python provides libraries like Numpy and Pandas, which eases this task by the use of parallel processing. It has in built functions for almost all of the frequently used concepts. Python supports multiple programming paradigms, such as object-oriented, imperative, functional, and procedural, making it suitable for a wide variety of use cases. Now let’s look at some of the reasons that make Python one of the fastest-growing programming languages in the world today. It is easy to learn— With Python, you have the advantage of using fewer lines of code to accomplish tasks compared to other languages. It is open-source — Python is free and uses a community-based model for development. It runs on Windows and Linux environmentsand can be ported to multiple platforms. It has widespread community support with plenty of useful analytics libraries available. It has several open-source libraries for data manipulation, data visualization, statistics, and mathematics, to name just a few. Its vast array of libraries and functionalities also include: Pandas for data cleaning and analysis Numpy and Scipy, for statistical analysis Beautifulsoup and Scrapy for web scraping Matplotlib and Seaborn to visually represent data in the form of bar graphs, histogram, and pie-charts OpenCV for image processing R is an open-source programming language and environment for data analysis, data visualization, machine learning, and statistics. Widely used for developing statistical software and performing data analytics, it is especially known for its ability to create compelling visualizations, giving it an edge over some of the other languages in this space. Some of the key benefits of R includethe following: It is an open-source platform-independent programming language It can be paired with many programming languages, including Python It is highly extensible, which means developers can continue to add functionalities by defining new functions Itfacilitates the handling of structured as well as unstructured data which means it has a more comprehensive data capability It has libraries such as Ggplot2 and Plotly that offer aesthetic graphical plots to its users You can make reports with the dataand scripts embedded in them; also, interactive web apps that allow users to play with the results and the data It is dominant among other programming languages for developing statistical tools Java is an object-oriented, class-based, and platform-independent programming language originally developed by Sun Microsystems. It is among the top-ranked programming languages used today. Java is used in a number of processes all through data analytics, including cleaning data, importing and exporting data, statistical analysis, and data visualization. In fact, most of the popular frameworks and tools used for big data are typically written in Java, such as Hadoop, Hive, and Spark. It is perfectly suited for speed-critical projects. A Unix/Linux Shell is a computer program written for the UNIX shell. It is a series of UNIX commands written in a plain text file to accomplish a specific task. Writing a shell script is fast and easy. It is most useful for repetitive tasks that may be time-consuming to execute by typing one line at a time. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include: file manipulation program execution system administration tasks such as disk backups and evaluating system logs installation scripts for complex programs executing routine backups running batches PowerShell is a cross-platform automation tool and configuration framework by Microsoft that is optimized for working with structured data formats, such as JSON, CSV, XML, and REST APIs, websites, and office applications. It consists of a command-line shell and scripting language. PowerShell is object-based, which makes it possible to filter, sort, measure, group, compare, and many more actions on objects as they pass through a data pipeline. It is also a good tool for data mining, building GUIs, and creating charts, dashboards, and interactive reports.
