The Python Book

2Getting Started

For the purposes of this book, we want you to install the Anaconda distribution of Python that is available at https://www.anaconda.com. Here, you have distributions for Windows, Mac, and Linux, which can be easily installed on your computer. Once you have the Anaconda installed, you will have access to the Anaconda navigator as shown in Figure 2.1.

Here, you get the following included by default:

• JupyterLab
• Notebook
• Qt Console
• Spyder

To follow the examples within this book you can use the Notebook or Qt Console. The Notebook is an interactive web based editor as shown in Figure 2.2.

Here, you can type your code, run the command, and then see the result, which is a nice way to work and is very popular. Here, we will show how we can define a variable x and then just type x and run the command with the run button to show the result (Figure 2.3).

However for the purposes of the book we will use a console‐based view that you can easily obtain through the Qt Console. An example is shown in Figure 2.4.

Like with the notebook, we show the same example using Qt Console in Figure 2.5.

Within this book we will denote anything that is an input with and with any output having no arrows preceding it (Figure 2.6).

Another concept that the reader will need to be familiar with is the ability to navigate using the terminal (linux systems including mac) or command prompt (windows). ...