In this appendix:
- How to install Python for the most popular desktop operating systems
- Why and how to set up a virtual environment for your projects
Code examples in this book are written in Python. There are two main reasons for it:
- Python is a programming language popular with people who work with data, so it’s likely that you’re already familiar with it.
- Python is easy to read, so even if you’re not familiar with it you’re nonetheless likely to understand the code example.
That means that if you want to follow along and execute the code examples in this book you’re going to need Python. Because of Python’s popularity it’s an easy task.
Python is at a turning point in its life. The immensely popular version 2 is being phased out for version 3. Because of the popularity of version 2 (version 2.7 in particular) and backward-incompatibility, the migration takes time.
We look to the future so all the code examples in this book use version 3. There are some minor releases (3.1, 3.2, and so on) and we’ll use one feature, virtual environments, that wasn’t introduced until version 3.3 as a standard library in Python (until then it existed as separate software and worked for both versions 2 and 3). So, when picking a release aim for the most recent version to get all the goodies that the Python community has introduced in each release, and avoid installing a version older than 3.3.