README

This repository is to help get you started with python/anaconda.

Hopefully this README gets updated as this repo grows.

Installing Packages

Beginning Instructions

Git

Git is a tool to track software developement.

Git is most easily used from the command line. This means that you will need to know a few window command line commands before you can effectively use git.

Install git and make a github account.

do it.

1. open the windows command line.
   • in win10 you can type in sequence: StartButton -> 'cmd' -> Enter
2. type 'git' and hit enter
3. you should see a git specific help text. If you do not figure out what is wrong via googling

create a directory

We want a place to hold our python programs we are going to write. Lets make a folder on the commandline because it is good to know how to do.

Windows has some specific commands for navigating folders (directories).

• cd - show the current directory
• cd <directory> - change directory to the provided directory
• dir - show a list of the directories in the current directory
• mkdir <directory> - create an empty directory with the given name

We want to navigate to 'Documents' and create a folder 'python' it will probably look something like this:

dir 
cd Documents
mkdir python
cd python

we should now be in a python directory inside documents. This is where we will put the git repo.

Cloning this repository

The first thing we are using git for is a way to download the latest versions of the files stored here. This is called a 'clone'. Clone will copy the current versions of the files as well as the history of revisions that the files went through to to get there latest forms.

on the main page of this repository on github.com there is a button 'clone or download'. click this and copy the url that comes up.

In the terminal in the python directory that we created run git clone <url> to paste the url into the terminal you can hit shift+insert

doing

dir

should show the newly cloned repository. We did our first git thing yay.

Anaconda/Python

We setting up a python environment and installing packages to that environment. You can think of an environment as customizable version of python. All the packages and configurations for that environment are saved to that environment alone.

Creating an environment ultimately yields a version of the python interpreter that has all of the correct libraries installed. Anaconda provides funtionality to manage/run multiple python environments.

Create a new python environment

1. open anaconda
2. Look at the tabs on the left. Click 'Environments'
3. One column over at the bottom of the screen click 'Create'
4. Check python
5. name it whatever you want
6. select '3.7' from the dropdown menu

Opening your environement

Anaconda is cool because of all the different ways you can launch your environment. We are going to focus on the terminal.

1. hit the play button on the newly created environment.
2. click 'Open terminal'
   • this will open the windows command prompt
   • this particular window of the windows command prompt will use the version of the python interpreter that we setup in anaconda.

Pip

Pip is a package installer for python. The version of pip in the newly opened terminal will install packages to our python environment that we created in anaconda.

pip can install many packages at once. The packages are listed one per line in 'requirements.txt' in this repository.

The command to install all the packages:

pip install -r requirements.txt

now run this to see if everything worked:

python hi.py