DSI Python Workshop, Part 2

April 21st, 2017

Second in a two-part series (part 1 is here), the workshop will be an interactive example of start-to-finish data analysis in Python.

The workshop is aimed at people who have some programming experience, but not necessarily in Python. If you are unfamiliar with concepts like if-statements, for-loops, and data frames, you may find the workshop hard to understand.

Getting Started

Before coming to the workshop, please install the software discussed here! Downloading and installing the software takes time, so if you try to do it during the workshop you might not be able to keep up.

You'll need Python 3 and the following packages:

• jupyter
• numpy
• pandas
• bokeh
• requests
• lxml

Brief installation advice for each platform is listed below.

Windows & OS X

On these operating systems, we recommend installing the Python 3.6 version of Anaconda. Anaconda automatically handles system configuration and includes the Python packages listed above. The full list of packages installed with Anaconda is available here.

After installing Anaconda, you can verify that the install worked correctly by opening a system terminal and running this command:

jupyter notebook

This should open a new browser window (or tab) that shows the Jupyter notebook dashboard. If this works, you can close the browser window and then enter Ctrl-C in the terminal to quit the Jupyter notebook program.

Linux

On Linux, we recommend installing Python 3 and the required Python packages through your distribution's package manager. Any Python packages that are not available through your distribution can be installed from the system terminal with

pip3 install PACKAGENAME

You may need to use your distribution's package manager to install pip before running these commands.