The book's collection of projects, comprehensive sample solutions, and follow-up exercises encompass practical topics pertaining to data processing, including:

Non-standard, complex data formats, such as robot logs and email messages
Text processing and regular expressions
Newer technologies, such as Web scraping, Web services, Keyhole Markup Language (KML), and Google Earth
Statistical methods, such as classification trees, k-nearest neighbors, and na Bayes
Visualization and exploratory data analysis
Relational databases and Structured Query Language (SQL)
Simulation
Algorithm implementation
Large data and efficiency

Suitable for self-study or as supplementary reading in a statistical computing course, the book enables instructors to incorporate interesting problems into their courses so that students gain valuable experience and data science skills. Students learn how to acquire and work with unstructured or semistructured data as well as how to narrow down and carefully frame the questions of interest about the data.

Blending computational details with statistical and data analysis concepts, this book provides readers with an understanding of how professional data scientists think about daily computational tasks. It will improve readers computational reasoning of real-world data analyses.