Python 3

Throughout this second edition of Web Scraping with Python, we will use Python 3. The Python Software Foundation has announced Python 2 will be phased out of development and support in 2020; for this reason, we and many other Pythonistas aim to move development to the support of Python 3, which at the time of this publication is at version 3.6. This book is complaint with Python 3.4+.

If you are familiar with using Python Virtual Environments or Anaconda, you likely already know how to set up Python 3 in a new environment. If you'd like to install Python 3 globally, we recommend searching for your operating system-specific documentation. For my part, I simply use Virtual Environment Wrapper (https://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) to easily maintain many different environments for different projects and versions of Python. Using either Conda environments or virtual environments is highly recommended, so that you can easily change dependencies based on your project needs without affecting other work you are doing. For beginners, I recommend using Conda as it requires less setup. The Conda introductory documentation (https://conda.io/docs/intro.html) is a good place to start!