Tools-in-Action

A Practical Data Science Book

1 Introduction

Welcome to the Tools-in-Action book! This project serves as a hands-on, practical walkthrough of the core tools used throughout the data-science workflow. Each chapter focuses on one essential skill—from Git and Linux basics, to shell scripting, SQL, pandas, HTML scraping, testing, PyTorch, and finally Quarto itself.

The goal of this book is not only to show what these tools do, but how they fit together in a reproducible pipeline. By working through each section, you will see how real data moves from raw files → processing → feature engineering → modeling → reporting.

You’ll find short explanations, runnable examples, and small synthetic datasets so that every chapter can be executed cleanly on any machine. Whether you’re reviewing concepts from the course or building your own data-science toolkit, this book provides a structured, end-to-end reference that mirrors a real-world workflow.