appendix Python installation instructions
The projects in the book are technology agnostic, and the example solutions are mostly about the process, not the specifics of Python, which is my technology of choice. However, if you are a Python user like me, you might want to recreate my results on your machine and take my example solution as a starting point. This appendix explains how to install Python and set it up in a way that mimics the setup I used for the example solutions.
Usually, the Python libraries required for a project are listed in the accompanying Jupyter notebooks and can be inferred from the import statements. That is, if the code in a solution imports pandas, you will need to have installed the pandas library. However, to recreate my examples exactly, you need to have the same version of each library as functionality changes across versions. There are many ways to ensure your Python environment is set up the same as mine, but generally, this is done using virtual environments.
Note It is not necessary to have exactly the same setup to recreate the solutions in the book. You can likely use a newer Python version and newer versions of libraries such as pandas and get the same results. However, the virtual environments are explicitly pinned to older versions of both Python and the necessary libraries to ensure compatibility with each other. An example is the recordlinkage library used in chapter 3, which at time of writing is incompatible with pandas version 2.0.