Installing important Python packages
One of the things that make Python so easy and fun to work with is the extensive collection of libraries available from central repositories. Let's install some of the packages we will need for the recipes in this cookbook.
Getting ready
For this recipe, you can work from SSH, serial, or a terminal window inside a VNC session. If you decide to use Geany, it has a convenient window at the bottom with a terminal window so you can test your scripts on the fly.
In the following screenshot, you can see that the bottom half of the screen is a normal terminal window, while the Python script is available for editing above it. When you are doing things such as debugging and optimizing, an environment like this can make it a lot easier:
How to do it...
The Python Package Index is a repository of libraries for both Python 2 (pip) and Python 3 (pip3). The pip utility works for Python a lot like apt-get works for Linux: it lets you search for, install, uninstall...
