Bamboo Weekly is a weekly Pandas practice newsletter — hands-on Pandas exercises built on real-world data, with detailed worked solutions and a Jupyter notebook the next day.
Here is the problem it solves. Pandas is immense, and using it can be overwhelming. Plenty of people have written Python for years and still do not feel confident — constantly googling, jumping to Stack Overflow, or asking ChatGPT. With Pandas, which has its own way of thinking, that feeling runs even deeper. There is only one real fix: deliberate practice. Not toy examples or datasets that have been cleaned and massaged in advance, but the rough-and-tumble of real data and the ambiguous questions analysts actually face.
That is what Bamboo Weekly gives you, week by week, feature by feature. Over time you become fluent with Pandas: faster, more confident, and able to solve real problems at work — while discovering the hidden corners of the library that make the work genuinely fun.
How it works
Each week brings a new set of questions built on a current-events dataset. The detailed solutions follow the next day, along with a downloadable Jupyter notebook you can run and adapt. Thursday walkthroughs and live office hours help you get unstuck fast. You try the problems yourself, then compare your approach with a worked solution — the loop that actually builds skill.
Practice Pandas by skill
Every exercise is tagged by the Pandas skills it exercises, so you can practice exactly what you want to improve:
- Pivot tables
- Grouping & aggregation
- Joining & merging data
- Dates & times
- Plotting & visualization
- Cleaning messy data
- Reading CSV files
- Working with Excel
- Window functions
- Multi-indexes
- Text & strings
- Filtering & selecting
Or see the full Pandas practice by skill directory. Or look up a specific method in the Pandas methods index.
Start practicing
Browse the full archive of back issues or jump straight into a recent one such as Bamboo Weekly #172 (World Cup). Want to focus on one skill? Browse the exercises by skill. New here? The FAQ explains exactly how everything works. The opening questions of every issue are free to read; a subscription unlocks the complete set of exercises and all of the worked solutions.
“Many books teach Pandas, but Bamboo Weekly is unique in providing regular exercise and deliberate practice. After being unemployed for a long time, I landed a job — what made me stand out was my knowledge of Pandas.” — Bart Willems
About the author
Bamboo Weekly is written by Reuven M. Lerner, a full-time Python and Pandas trainer since 1995 who has taught the topic to companies around the world, written books about programming, and spoken at conferences for two decades. He is the author of the book Pandas Workout. Bamboo Weekly is a LernerPython product.