The first step is to download Anaconda from Continuum Analytics' website (http://continuum.io/downloads). This is actually not the easiest part since several versions are available. Three properties define a particular version:

Once you have found the right link for your OS and Python 3 64-bit, you can download the package. You should then find it in your downloads directory (depending on your OS and your browser's settings).

The Anaconda installer comes in different flavors depending on your OS, as follows:

Then, follow the instructions to install Anaconda on your computer. Here are a few remarks:

Before you get started with Anaconda, there are a few things you need to know:

You can skip this section if you already know how to do these things.

To test Anaconda once it has been installed, open a terminal and type python. This opens a Python console, not to be confused with the OS terminal. The Python console is identified with a >>> prompt string, whereas the OS terminal is identified with a $ (Linux/OS X) or > (Windows) prompt string. These strings are displayed in the terminal, often preceded by your computer's name, your login, and the current directory (for example, yourname@computer:~$ on Linux or PS C:\Users\YourName> on Windows). You can type commands after the prompt string. After typing python, you should see something like the following:

$ python
Python 3.4.3 |Anaconda 2.3.0 (64-bit)| (default, Jun  4 2015, 15:29:08) [GCC 4.4.7 20120313 (Red Hat 4.4.7-1)] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

What matters is that Anaconda or Continuum Analytics is mentioned here. Otherwise, typing python might have launched your system's default Python, which is not the one you want to use in this book.

If you have this problem, you may need to add the path to the Anaconda executables to your system path. For example, this path will be ~/anaconda3/bin if you chose to install Anaconda in ~/anaconda3. The bin directory contains Anaconda executables including python.

If you have any problem installing and testing Anaconda, you can ask for help on the mailing list (see the link in the References section under the Installing Python with Anaconda section of this chapter).

Next, exit the Python prompt by typing exit() and pressing Enter.

Anaconda lets you create different isolated Python environments. For example, you can have a Python 2 distribution for the rare cases where you need to temporarily switch to Python 2.

To create a new environment for Python 2, type the following command in an OS terminal:

$ conda create -n py2 anaconda python=2.7

This will create a new isolated environment named py2 based on the original Anaconda distribution, but with Python 2.7. You could also use the command conda env: type conda env -h to see the details.

You can now activate your py2 environment by typing the following command in a terminal:

Now, you should see a (py2) prefix in front of your terminal prompt. Typing python in your terminal with the py2 environment activated will open a Python 2 interpreter.

Type deactivate on Windows or source deactivate on Linux/OS X to deactivate the environment in the terminal.

Here is a list of common commands:

Some commands ask for confirmation (you need to press y to confirm). You can also use the -y option to avoid the confirmation prompt.

If conda install somepackage fails, you can try pip install somepackage instead. This will use the Python Package Index (PyPI) instead of Anaconda. Many scientific Anaconda packages are easier to install than the corresponding PyPI packages because they are precompiled for your platform. However, many packages are available on PyPI but not on Anaconda.

Here are some references:

Here are a few references about Anaconda:

All of this book's code is available on GitHub as notebooks. We recommend that you download the notebooks and experiment with them as you're working through the book.

Here is how to download the book's notebooks:

This will download the very latest version of the code into a minibook subdirectory in your home directory. You can also choose another directory.

From this directory, you can update to the latest version at any time by typing git pull.