Learn Python by Building Data Science Applications

Conda for virtual environments

In many cases, it is beneficial to be able to switch between different versions of Python – for testing purposes, or if some specific package or tool does not support the version you normally use. Moreover, in some cases, it might be nice to switch between different sets of installed packages (or different versions of the same ones), again for the purpose of testing, or if they somehow conflict with one another. You can easily do both things using Conda environments. 

Compared to virtual machines, environments do not allocate resources, memory or CPU, but merely substitute paths to specific tools – in our case, Python, and install packages, temporarily, tricking a machine into running different versions as if ...