gccbut others may not on debian systemsyou can install gcc by executingsudo apt-get install gcc if you type gcc on the command line it should say something likegcc gccno input files nowtime to install pandaseasy_install pandas if you installed epdfree as rootyou may need to add sudo to the command and enter the sudo or root password to verify things are workingperform the same checks as in the os section python and python the python community is currently undergoing drawn-out transition from the python series of interpreters to the python series until the appearance of python all python code was backwards compatible the community decided that in order to move the language forwardcertain backwards incompatible changes were necessary am writing this book with python as its basisas the majority of the scientific python community has not yet transitioned to python the good news is thatwith few exceptionsyou should have no trouble following along with the book if you happen to be using python integrated development environments (ideswhen asked about my standard development environmenti almost always say "ipython plus text editori typically write program and iteratively test and debug each piece of it in ipython it is also useful to be able to play around with data interactively and visually verify that particular set of data manipulations are doing the right thing libraries like pandas and numpy are designed to be easy-to-use in the shell howeversome will still prefer to work in an ide instead of text editor they do provide many nice "code intelligencefeatures like completion or quickly pulling up the documentation associated with functions and classes here are some that you can exploreeclipse with pydev plugin python tools for visual studio (for windows userspycharm spyder komodo ide installation and setup www it-ebooks info