Chapter 1 is a general introduction to the book. It sets out the research context, key research questions, research methodologies and other relevant information about the book. This sets the stage for the discussion of substantive topics in the following chapters.

This preface introduces “A Hands-On Introduction to Data Science with Python,” designed for advanced undergraduates and graduate students across diverse fields including information science, business, psychology, and sociology. The book requires minimal programming experience but expects computational thinking and basic statistics knowledge. It’s structured in four parts: foundations of data science, tools and platforms (Python programming and cloud computing), machine learning techniques, and real-world applications. The second edition adds "DS in Practice" boxes, cloud computing coverage, AI/ethics discussions, and downloadable datasets. The book emphasizes practical, hands-on learning with 39 solved exercises, 40 try-it-yourself problems, and 57 end-of-chapter problems, making data science accessible to non-technical students.

The opening chapter sets the stage for the book. It starts with a recount of the author’s first day at The Villages and her motivation to explore the aging experience in this "city for seniors." The second part details the study that forms the book’s foundation, including the research questions, methods, and participant descriptions. The third part outlines the book’s structure, providing a brief overview of each chapter.

This chapter provides an overview of the topics covered in this, the book’s structure, the scope and presentation of the books, and the target audience for the book.

Drawing together and supplementing the structural and stichometric parallels observed beween Propertius and Virgil so far, this chapter refreshes an old debate about the genesis of Book 4 with the argument that the collection builds into itself a carefully designed Virgilian architecture. Or rather, architectures: Propertius 4 vacillates beween a ten-unit bucolic substructure and a twelve-unit epic superstructure; like the Georgics and the whole Virgilian corpus that encloses that work, it locates at its centre a Callimachean ‘Victoria Caesaris’, complete with Apolline temple; and in the ostensibly ‘Iliadic’ 4.7 and ‘Odyssean’ 4.8 it inverts the Homeric diptych of the two hexads of the Aeneid, but in a way that also recognizes the Virgilian sequence and how it is blurred. Symbolic of this protean book is Vertumnus in elegy 4.2, the shapeshifting god whose loquacious statue – the work of the Mamurius who fabricated the eleven copies of Numa’s legendary shield – not only replicates, en abyme, the book’s range of Virgilian lexis, but also encodes its Virgilian structure. A coda to the chapter shows that Ovid repeatedly draws on Vertumnus as ambassador of metamorphic elegiac-epic poetics.

This chapter begins by highlighting southern African archaeology’s importance at a global level, stressing the enormous time-depth over which hominins have been present in the region, the diversity of its archaeological record, and the contributions that this has made and continues to make to broader debates within archaeology and anthropology. Next, it indicates key changes made here relative to the first edition of this book in 2002 and then identifies the main sources of evidence available for reconstructing southern Africa’s past. These include archaeology, palaeoclimatic and palaeoenvironmental science, ethnographic data, historical linguistics, genetics, and oral and written histories. The chapter then introduces the overall structure of the book, ending with a discussion and justification of some key matters of nomenclature regarding how southern Africa’s varied inhabitants have been/should be called. Guidance is also given on matters of orthography relative to sounds not used in English.