A.4 Installing a virtual environment
In Appendix F, Production Notes, I list the Python modules I have installed on my computer. There are almost 200 of them.
I wish I could say that each of these modules works flawlessly with every other, but that’s not the case. When a developer updates one module, it could break other code that depends on it.
Instead of having one big Python environment of your system, you can create smaller virtual environments. A virtual environment holds the Python interpreter, tools, standard libraries, and only the compatible pip-installed modules and packages you need for your project. This feature is especially useful when you work on several projects that require different sets of modules because you can set up a virtual environment for each. [PYV]
Once you have installed Python, as I discussed in section A.2, you can install a virtual environment. First,...
