Installing Python for financial data science

What's the most important part of a holiday? Well, if you can't get to the airport on time, it's unlikely you'll be going anywhere. When it comes to learning Python, the most important thing is to install Python in the first place!

So how do you install Python, together with all the libraries you might need for financial data science? You could avoid installing Python on your own machine, and use something like Google Colab, which is a Jupyter notebook already setup on the cloud or something like Repl.it, which is another online Python option. In many online installations of Python, you might not necessarily have all the libraries you want installed, so you'll have to install them in addition though using tools like pip or conda which we discuss later.

Installing Python on your own machine (or a cloud machine)

There are many Python distributions you could use (and I have to admit I haven't used them all!), and you might find there's often already one installed on your computer. Whenever I teach Python, I tend to recommend downloading and installing the Anaconda Python distribution. One reason is that it's already got a lot of data science libraries included in the standard Anaconda installation. It also has a few GUI tools, although I must admit, I tend to prefer just to use command line tools (which are much quicker).

pip vs conda to install Python packages

Whatever Python distribution you choose to use, it's likely you'll need to install additional libraries....

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