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Installation

For the course

You will normally not need to install Python on your computer before your Python Charmers course.

For face-to-face courses, we will normally install this together in the first 10 minutes of the course.

For online courses, you will normally access our cloud coding server https://cpuhub.pythoncharmers.com cpuvia your browser (Firefox, Chrome, or Safari). (We will send you login details shortly before the course starts.)

For before or after the course

To install and use Python on your own computer either before or after your Python Charmers course, we recommend the latest Anaconda Python 3.x installer, which is available from here. This comes with Python and several hundred of the most important 3rd-party packages.

Choose to install it for all users and choose a folder name without a space in it. (Examples: C:\Python3, /home/user/anaconda.)

More details

Feel free to skip the rest of this chapter if the above instructions are enough. Otherwise, read on for more details about installing Python via Anaconda.

Python 3

As of April 2024, the latest version is Python 3.12. The Python 3.x series is the future of all development in the language. Python 2 is a dead end; it will not be developed further. We will use Python 3.x as the default version for the training course.

When we refer to "Python 3" in this book, we will assume any version of Python equal to or greater than version 3.7.

Older Python versions

Python 2 is now a "legacy" platform that has received no major updates since 2010.

The vast majority of Python's best packages now support Python 3.x (see http://py3readiness.org), so we highly recommend starting new projects in Python 3.x. Python 3.x is also cleaner and more consistent and has a healthy number of new useful features versus 2.7.

However, note that Python 3.x is backwardly incompatible with the Python 2.x series. If you are developing an existing Python 2.x code base, you must update the code to support Python 3 idioms or stick with the older version.

It is now relatively easy to provide automatic forward compatibility for running Python 3-style code under Python 2 using the python-future project, which Python Charmers sponsors. See http://python-future.org for information on writing compatible code.

Your training course with Python Charmers will largely describe how to write code that is compatible with both Python 3.x and Python 2.x.

Installation requirements

We highly recommend at least 8 GB of memory (RAM) and a 64-bit operating system. All of the 3 major operating systems are supported: Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Anaconda Python

We recommend installing Python via the Anaconda distribution, because it:

  • is free

  • can be installed without Administrator / root privileges

  • supports all three major platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux)

  • is up-to-date

  • can be upgraded easily

  • provides binaries of many of the traditionally hardest-to-install

    packages, like SciPy, scikit-learn, Numba, PIL (via Pillow), lxml, and

    libraries for geospatial analysis.

The Anaconda Python 3.x installer is available here.

We highly recommend that you install Anaconda:

  1. for your user account (not for all users). This way you can install and remove packages later without needing Administrator / root access privileges.
  2. in a folder without spaces. For example: C:\Python3 or /home/user/anaconda are good choices. Spaces in the Python path occasionally cause scripts to break.

Help?

If you would like any help installing Python before or after your course, please contact us at help@pythoncharmers.com.

Summary

The rest of this Course Preparation site assumes that you have Python installed on your computer.