Book Image

Dancing with Python

By : Robert S. Sutor
Book Image

Dancing with Python

By: Robert S. Sutor

Overview of this book

Dancing with Python helps you learn Python and quantum computing in a practical way. It will help you explore how to work with numbers, strings, collections, iterators, and files. The book goes beyond functions and classes and teaches you to use Python and Qiskit to create gates and circuits for classical and quantum computing. Learn how quantum extends traditional techniques using the Grover Search Algorithm and the code that implements it. Dive into some advanced and widely used applications of Python and revisit strings with more sophisticated tools, such as regular expressions and basic natural language processing (NLP). The final chapters introduce you to data analysis, visualizations, and supervised and unsupervised machine learning. By the end of the book, you will be proficient in programming the latest and most powerful quantum computers, the Pythonic way.
Table of Contents (29 chapters)
2
Part I: Getting to Know Python
10
PART II: Algorithms and Circuits
14
PART III: Advanced Features and Libraries
19
References
20
Other Books You May Enjoy
Appendices
Appendix C: The Complete UniPoly Class
Appendix D: The Complete Guitar Class Hierarchy
Appendix F: Production Notes

A.4 Installing a virtual environment

In Appendix F, Production Notes, I list the Python modules I have installed on my computer. There are almost 200 of them.

I wish I could say that each of these modules works flawlessly with every other, but that’s not the case. When a developer updates one module, it could break other code that depends on it.

Instead of having one big Python environment of your system, you can create smaller virtual environments. A virtual environment holds the Python interpreter, tools, standard libraries, and only the compatible pip-installed modules and packages you need for your project. This feature is especially useful when you work on several projects that require different sets of modules because you can set up a virtual environment for each. [PYV]

Once you have installed Python, as I discussed in section A.2, you can install a virtual environment. First,...