setting up python environment the starting step for our journey into the world of data science is the setup of our python environment we usually have two options for setting up our environmentinstall python and the necessary libraries individually use pre-packaged python distribution that comes with necessary librariesi anaconda anaconda is packaged compilation of python along with whole suite of variety of librariesincluding core libraries which are widely used in data science developed by anacondaformerly known as continuum analyticsit is often the go-to setup for data scientists travis oliphantprimary contributor to both the numpy and scipy librariesis anaconda' president and one of the co-founders the anaconda distribution is bsd licensed and hence it allows us to use it for commercial and redistribution purposes major advantage of this distribution is that we don' require an elaborate setup and it works well on all flavors of operating systems and platformsespecially windowswhich can often cause problems with installing specific python packages thuswe can get started with our data science journey with just one download and install the anaconda distribution is widely used across industry data science environments and it also comes with wonderful idespyder (scientific python development environment)besides other useful utilities like jupyter notebooksthe ipython consoleand the excellent package management toolconda recently they have also talked extensively about jupyterlabthe next generation ui for project jupyter we recommend using the anaconda distribution and also checking out com/what-is-anacondato learn more about anaconda set up anaconda python environment the first step in setting up your environment with the required anaconda distribution is downloading the required installation package from the anaconda distribution the important point to note here is that we will be using python and the corresponding anaconda distribution python was released on june compared to which released on december we have opted for as we want to ensure that none of the libraries that we will be using in this book have any compatibility issues henceas python has been around for long time we avoid any such compatibility issues by opting for it howeveryou are free to use python and the code used in this book is expected to work without major issues we chose to leave out python since support for python will be ending in and from the python community visionit is clear that python is the future and we recommend you use it download the anaconda -windows- package (the one with python from repo continuum io/archivea screenshot of the target page is shown in figure - we have chosen the windows os specifically because sometimesfew python packages or libraries cause issues with installing or running and hence we wanted to make sure we cover those details if you are using any other os like linux or macosxdownload the correct version for your os and install it