- When you're working with installing software
in the context of Anaconda,
there are two so-called package managers
that you're typically going to use
and these are going to enable you to install
what are known as packages.
These are basically bundles of software
that represent a given library
or tool that you'd like to add to your Python distribution.
Now there are two key package managers that you'll encounter
throughout these videos.
You already saw it in a preceding video,
the conda package manager
and that package manager is not only going to enable you
to install additional software
as you'll see in various later lessons
but it also is going to be the tool that you use
to manage Anaconda from the command line to do things like,
create customer Anaconda environments
which are important for example,
for reproducibility or to add and remove those environments,
activate those environments
and also remove and install software as well.
There's also one called pip
and you'll use both of these
because in the case of pip,
more packages are available through pip
than are currently available through conda.
Now in general, we're going to use conda whenever possible.
So anytime you want to install a new library
or tool into the Anaconda Python Distribution,
one of the nice things about doing that with conda
is it's going to check everything else
that you've previously installed with conda,
check their dependencies among those items,
and only perform the install if the dependencies are correct
On the other hand,
there are some things you simply can't install with conda
in which case, we will typically use pip.
Now some people do prefer to just use pip all the time
because of the fact that it supports more packages.
What I would recommend is trying conda first
if we give you such an instruction.
If conda doesn't work for any reason,
then you would go ahead and use pip instead
and that's the approach that we took
throughout our writing effort as well