This appendix covers installing and setting up a Python environment for scientific computing on commonly used platforms. As discussed in Chapter
1, the scientific computing environment for Python is not a single product but rather a diverse ecosystem of packages and libraries, and there are numerous possible ways to install and configure a Python environment on any given platform. Python is rather easy to install,
1 and on many operating systems, it is even preinstalled. All pure Python libraries hosted on the
Python Package Index2 are also easily installed, for example, using
pip and a command such as
pip install PACKAGE, where
PACKAGE is the name of the package to install. The
pip software then searches for the package ...