Technical requirements

This course assumes that you have a basic knowledge of Python for programming, so we will not introduce Python in this book.

Note

For a quick refresher on Python fundamentals, please refer to https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/python-fundamentals-for-data-science/.

Instead, you will be introduced to Biopython, which is a powerful library in Python that has tools for computational molecular biology for performing genomics data analysis.

Installing Biopython

Installing Biopython is very easy, and it will not take more than a few minutes on any operating system.

Step 1 – Verifying Python installation

Before we install Biopython, first check to see whether Python is installed using the following command in your command prompt:

$ python --version
Python 3.7.4

Note

The $ character represents the command prompt.

If your command prompt returns something like this, then it shows that Python is installed and 3.7.4 is your version...