This introductory chapter discussed how to install and manage the code libraries that will be used in this book. We'll be working mainly with Anaconda, a freemium open source distribution of the Python programming language that aims to simplify package management and deployment. We discussed how to install Anaconda, and the options for Python package management using Anaconda Navigator, Anaconda Cloud, conda, and pip. Finally, we discussed virtual environments and how to manage these using Anaconda, conda, and virtualenv.
The recommended installation for this book is the Anaconda3 version, that will install not only a working Python environment, but also a large repository of local Python packages, the Jupyter Notebook application, as well as the conda package manager, Anaconda Navigator, and Cloud. In the next chapter, we will introduce the major code libraries used to process and analyze geospatial data.