Data Science in Practice

A Guide for Capstone, Consulting, and Client-Based Work

This folder contains the Bookdown source for a searchable HTML textbook and professional project reference.

Build in RStudio

Install the required packages once:

install.packages(c("bookdown", "rmarkdown", "knitr"))

Open the project folder in RStudio and run:

bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd", "bookdown::gitbook")

The searchable HTML book will be written to docs/.

The GitBook is split by second-level sections. Each ## heading begins a separate page, while third-level ### headings remain on the same page as their parent section. This keeps individual topics shorter and easier to navigate, consistent with the page structure used in the Precalculus textbook.

Each substantive chapter begins with a short orientation paragraph followed by learning outcomes and an individually defined key-term list on the chapter-title page. Each chapter ends with one Chapter Review page containing a summary, common mistakes, exercises, and questions for discussion. Every exercise is followed immediately by a Check Your Work or One Possible Answer dropdown.

Contents

The book contains developed chapters on:

• applied data science projects and analytical questioning;
• project planning, team charters, and interim reviews;
• confidentiality and responsible data use;
• data dictionaries and reproducible EDA;
• secondary data and geographic sources;
• machine learning, forecasting, projections, and CLV;
• storytelling, visualization, recommendations, reports, and presentations;
• R, Excel, Power BI, statistics, and machine-learning refreshers; and
• reusable project templates and checklists.

The repository also contains a complete synthetic NVRW data package with raw, clean, and derived CSV files; an Excel workbook; reproducible R scripts; a Power BI implementation guide; and a final synthesis appendix that connects every project component.

The fictional North Valley Recreation and Wellness case connects methods across the book. Shorter industry examples provide additional context.

SOURCE_INVENTORY.md records how the uploaded materials were used and which reuse restrictions require attention.