Page - 209 - in Programming for Computations – Python - A Gentle Introduction to Numerical Simulations with Python

AGettingAccesstoPython This appendixdescribesdifferent technologies for either installingPythononyour owncomputeroraccessingPython in thecloud. PlainPython isveryeasy to install anduseincloudservices,butforthisbookweneedmanyadd-onpackagesfordoing scientific computations. Python togetherwith thesepackagesconstitute a complex software eco system that is non-trivial to build, sowe strongly recommend to use oneof the techniquesdescribednext1. A.1 RequiredSoftware Thestrictly requiredsoftwarepackages forworkingwith thisbookare Python2 version2.7 [25] NumericalPython3 (NumPy) [19,20] forarraycomputing Matplotlib4 [8, 9] forplotting Desiredadd-onpackagesare IPython5 [22,23] for interactivecomputing SciTools6 [14] foradd-ons toNumPy ScientificPython7 [7] foradd-ons toNumPy pytest8 ornose9 for testingprograms pip10 for installingPythonpackages Cython11 forcompilingPython toC 1Some of the text is taken from the 4th edition of the bookA Primer on Scientifi Programming withPython, byH.P.Langtangen, publishedbySpringer, 2014. 2http://python.org 3http://www.numpy.org 4http://matplotlib.org 5http://ipython.org 6https://github.com/hplgit/scitools 7http://starship.python.net/crew/hinsen 8http://pytest.org/latest/ 9https://nose.readthedocs.org 10http://www.pip-installer.org 11http://cython.org 209©TheAuthor(s)2016 S.Linge,H.P.Langtangen,Programming for Computations –Python, Texts inComputational Science andEngineering15,DOI10.1007/978-3-319-32428-9_A