04. Setting Up Your Programming Environment

Anaconda and Jupyter Notebooks

If you haven't already done so, go through our short course on Anaconda and Jupyter notebooks to set up your computer. You will learn how to set up an environment for this course, which requires Python 3.6, Jupyter Notebook, NumPy, pandas, Matplotlib, and Seaborn.

We recommend downloading and installing Anaconda , even if you already have Python installed on your computer. It includes a great distribution of libraries and software built for data science that you'll be using in this course, some of which are otherwise difficult to install. It also makes it really easy to set up different environments on your computer so you can quickly switch between different versions of Python and packages! An example would be if one project you're working on requires Python 2.7 and another requires Python 3.6, as well as different dependencies. The free course on Anaconda and Jupyter notebooks linked above covers how to do this.