Hi, I'm pleased to announce the availability of the first release candidate of Pandas 0.19.0. Please try this RC and report any issues at the pandas issue tracker <https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues>. The release candidate can be installed with conda from our development channel (builds for osx-64, linux-64 and win-64 are available for Python 2.7, 3.4 and 3.5): conda install -c pandas pandas=0.19.0rc1 or with pip from PyPI <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pandas/0.19.0rc1> (wheels are available): pip install --pre pandas==0.19.0rc1 --- THIS IS NOT A PRODUCTION RELEASE This is a major release from 0.18.1 and includes a number of API changes, several new features, enhancements, and performance improvements along with a large number of bug fixes. Highlights include: - New method merge_asof for asof-style time-series joining, see here <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-...> - The .rolling() method is now time-series aware, see here <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-...> - read_csv now supports parsing Categorical data, see here <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-...> - A function union_categorical has been added for combining categoricals, see here <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-...> - PeriodIndex now has its own period dtype, and changed to be more consistent with other Index classes. See here <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-...> - Sparse data structures gained enhanced support of int and bool dtypes, see here <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-...> - Comparison operations with Series no longer ignores the index, see here <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-...> for an overview of the API changes. - Introduction of a pandas development API for utility functions, see here <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html#whatsnew-0190-...> . - Deprecation of Panel4D and PanelND. We recommend to represent these types of n-dimensional data with the xarray package <http://xarray.pydata.org/en/stable/>. - Removal of the previously deprecated modules pandas.io.data, pandas.io.wb, pandas.tools.rplot. See the Whatsnew <http://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/whatsnew.html> file for more information. Please report any issues here <https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/>. A big thanks to all contributors! Joris