Getting Started with Python
As we already discovered in Chapter 1, Introduction to Data Science, Python is the most commonly used language for data science, and so we will be using it exclusively in this book. In this chapter, we'll go through a crash course in Python. This should get you up to speed with the basics, although to learn Python in more depth, you should seek more resources. For example, Fabrizio Roman's Learning Python from Packt may be a resource you might want to check out in order to learn Python more deeply.
In this chapter, we'll cover the following topics:
- Installing Python with a Python distribution (Anaconda)
- Editing Python code with code text editors and Jupyter Notebooks
- Running code with Jupyter Notebooks, IPython, and the command line
- Installing Python packages and creating virtual environments
- The basics of Python programming, including strings, numbers, loops, data structures, functions, and classes ...