Week 34: Introduction to the course, Logistics and Practicalities

 

 

 

Software and needed installations

We will make extensive use of Python as programming language and its myriad of available libraries. You will find Jupyter notebooks invaluable in your work. You can run R codes in the Jupyter/IPython notebooks, with the immediate benefit of visualizing your data. You can also use compiled languages like C++, Rust, Julia, Fortran etc if you prefer. The focus in these lectures will be on Python.

If you have Python installed (we strongly recommend Python3) and you feel pretty familiar with installing different packages, we recommend that you install the following Python packages via pip as

  1. pip install numpy scipy matplotlib ipython scikit-learn mglearn sympy pandas pillow

For Python3, replace pip with pip3.

For OSX users we recommend, after having installed Xcode, to install brew. Brew allows for a seamless installation of additional software via for example

  1. brew install python3

For Linux users, with its variety of distributions like for example the widely popular Ubuntu distribution, you can use pip as well and simply install Python as

  1. sudo apt-get install python3 (or python for pyhton2.7)

etc etc.