Very exciting!

On Thursday, September 8, 2016 at 3:12:02 AM UTC-7, Joris Van den Bossche wrote:

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.

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 (wheels are available):

pip install --pre pandas==0.19.0rc1

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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
• The .rolling() method is now time-series aware, see here
• read_csv now supports parsing Categorical data, see here
• A function union_categorical has been added for combining categoricals, see here
• PeriodIndex now has its own period dtype, and changed to be more consistent with other Index classes. See here
• Sparse data structures gained enhanced support of int and bool dtypes, see here
• Comparison operations with Series no longer ignores the index, see here for an overview of the API changes.
• Introduction of a pandas development API for utility functions, see here.
• Deprecation of Panel4D and PanelND. We recommend to represent these types of n-dimensional data with the xarray package.
• Removal of the previously deprecated modules pandas.io.data, pandas.io.wb, pandas.tools.rplot.

See the Whatsnew file for more information. Please report any issues here.

A big thanks to all contributors!

Joris