Page - 313 - in Programming for Computations – Python - A Gentle Introduction to Numerical Simulations with Python 3.6, Volume Second Edition

A.3 AnacondaandSpyder 313 Asalternatives to installing the softwareonyourownlaptop,youmay: 1. Use a computer system at an institution where the software is installed. Such a system can also be used from your local laptop through remote login over a network. 2. Use awebservice. Asystemadministratorcantakethe listofsoftwarepackagesandinstall themissing onesona computersystem. Using a web service is straightforward, but has the disadvantage that you are constrained by the packages that you are allowed to install on the service. There are services (at the time of this writing) that suffice for basic scientific Python programming. However, for more complicated mathematical problems, you will need more sophisticated packages, more storage and more computer resources, which means that you will greatly benefit from having Python installed on your owncomputer. A.3 AnacondaandSpyder Anaconda15 is a free Python distribution (by Continuum Analytics) with hundreds of excellent Python packages, as well as Python itself, for doing a wide range of scientificcomputations. The Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Spyder comes with Anaconda and is our recommended tool for writing and running Python programs, unless you prefer a plain text editor for the writing of programs and a terminal window (explainedbelow,see AppendixA.4.3) for runningthem. A.3.1 SpyderonMac Spyder is started by typingspyder in a (new) Terminal application. If you get an error message unknown locale, you need to type the following line in the Terminal application, or preferably put the line in your$HOME/.bashrcUnix initialization file: export LANG=en_US.UTF-8; export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 A.3.2 InstallationofAdditionalPackages Anaconda installs thepip tool that is handyfor installing additionalpackages. Ina TerminalapplicationonMac,or in aPowerShell terminalonWindows,write Terminal pip install --user packagename 15 https://www.anaconda.com/distribution.