Installation of Anaconda

This book will utilize Anaconda Python version 3, specifically 3.6.1. At the time of writing, pandas is at version 0.20.2. The Anaconda installer by default will install Python, IPython, Jupyter Notebook, and pandas.

Anaconda Python can be downloaded from the Continuum Analytics website at http://continuum.io/downloads. The web server will identify your browser's operating system and present you with an appropriate software download file for that platform.

When opening this URL in your browser you will see a page similar to the following:

Click on the link for the installer for your platform. This will present you with a download page similar to the following:

Download the 3.x installer. The current version of Anaconda and which will be used in this book is 4.3.1, with Python 3.6.1:

Execute the installer for your platform, and when it's complete, open a command line or Terminal and execute the python command. You should see something similar to the following (this is on a Mac):

You can exit from the Python interpreter by issuing the exit() statement:

From the Terminal or command line you can verify the installed version of pandas with the pip show pandas command:

The current version that is installed is verified as 0.20.2. Please ensure you are using 0.20.2 or higher, as there are changes to pandas specific to this version that will be utilized.

Now that we have everything we need installed, let's move on to looking at using IPython and Jupyter Notebook.