Handling Data - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 29

Adjust the menu to show October 1, 2010, and click the View button. This
takes you to a different view that shows you details for your selected date
(see Figure 2-3).
FIGurE 2-3 Temperature data for a single day
There's temperature, degree days, moisture, precipitation, and plenty of
other data points, but for now, all you're interested in is maximum temper-
ature per day, which you can find in the second column, second row down.
On October 1, 2010, the maximum temperature in Buffalo was 62 degrees
Fahrenheit.
Getting that single value was easy enough. Now how can you get that max-
imum temperature value every day, during the year 2009? The easy-and-
straightforward way would be to keep changing the date in the drop-down.
Do that 365 times and you're done.
Wouldn't that be fun? No. You can speed up the process with a little bit of
code and some know-how, and for that, turn to the Python programming
language and Leonard Richardson's Python library called Beautiful Soup.
You're about to get your first taste of code in the next few paragraphs.
If you have programming experience, you can go through the following