- Welcome to the Before You Begin lesson.
In this lesson, I'm going to help you get setup
to work with these LiveLessons videos.
First off, we'll talk about how to acquire
the code examples that you'll want to run in parallel
with watching the videos.
Next up, we'll go ahead and talk about installing
the Anaconda Python distribution
and one of the nice things about this
is first of all,
it's available for macOS, Windows, and Linux,
and it's super easy to install on all three platforms.
But it also comes with a ton of popular
Python opensource libraries.
So you're often going to be able
to work with those libraries without having
to install them separately.
We will, of course, install some additional libraries
throughout these LiveLessons videos as well.
But we'll talk about the two different package managers,
which you'll use for installing those other libraries.
One of them is called Conda,
which is part of the Andaconda,
and one of them's called Pip.
And both of them can be used to install packages
into your Python system.
We'll also talk about installing some additional software
that will help you run some of the animations
that we provide in the context of what are known
as Jupyter Notebooks.
Jupyter Notebooks is a great way to work with Python,
allows you to combine text, audio, video, images,
and live executable code into a web-based document
and it's really the preferred way nowadays
to provide people with the results of a data science study
or other scientific study
in a manner that they can reproduce those results as well.
So I do encourage you to take a look,
especially as you go into lesson one,
at the test drive of Jupyter Notebooks,
to become familiar with that interface.
I think you'll find it to be a preferred way
to use and interact with Python.
We'll also talk about getting yourself
a Twitter Developer Account for use
in some of the later lessons
and finally, I'll provide you with my contact information
in case you have any questions
while you're watching the videos.