Defining Python

Python is one of the most common programming languages among data scientists, along with R. The main advantage of Python is its flexibility and simplicity. It makes the data analysis and manipulation easy by offering a lot of packages. It shows great performance in analyzing unstructured textual data and has a very good ecosystem of tools and packages for this purpose.

For the purposes of the book, we have chosen Python 3.5.2. It is the most up-to-date version, which implements many improvements compared to Python 2.7. The main advantage in text analysis is an automatic management of Unicode variables. Python 2.7 is still widely used by programmers and data scientists due to a big choice of external libraries, documentation, and online resources. However, the new version has already reached a sufficient level of compatibility with packages, and on top of it, offers multiple new features.

We will use the pip command tool for installation of all libraries and dependencies.