Start Playing with Python and Jupyter Notebook on Windows 10 (64 bit)

For you who are interested in data science must know about this software: Python, Anaconda and Jupyter Notebook. Usually this software is used when we do our task in offline mode. Wait! you have to know that this software takes up a lot of hard disk space and RAM when it run. So if you want to learn python but your computer specs are not good enough (RAM less than 4 GB and HDD less than 500 GB), I suggest you to use colab.research.google.com because it’s online or you can install Miniconda for smaller sizes. Back to the topic, in this story I just wanna talk about python, jupyter, anaconda and how to install all of them. Let’s get started

Most of beginners ask, “Why should we install Anaconda? We can start code python by just installing python software right? So we don’t need anaconda anymore.” It’s oky if your program is very simple, but how many packages will you use in your Data Science project? Will you install the package one by one? Are you sure you can handle the future issues dealing with the various libraries used? Take a moment. Anaconda is a free and open-source distribution of the Python and R programming languages for scientific computing. It comes with conda, a package, and environment manager. In the real project we use it to install, uninstall, and update packages in our project environments that make our work easier to do. Are you ready to install it? Download python and anaconda here.

Installing Python

• After you download python file, double click the file and choose install now for the default setting. Don’t forget to check list add Python 3.8 to PATH (you can also setting manually in environment variables).
• Click next in Optional Features.
• Advanced Options, if you want to change the location where installing your file just select the location on custom install locations, then click install.
• Wait until the installation process is complete. Your Python is ready to use now.

But wait, make sure that you already add the python file in your system variables path, open cmd and type the code below to see your python version.

python --version

You can also install Jupyter using this commend line, but let’s start install anaconda in the next instruction.

python -m pip install jupyter

Installing Anaconda

• Double click anaconda file to start the installation, and then click next.
• License Agreement, click I agree.
• Select Install Type, you can choose just me or all user then click next.
• Choose Install Location, then click next. (Attention on your HDD space available, because the default installation need 3GB HDD space. When you try to install other python library, the space will increase depend on the size of its library).

• Advanced Installation Options, just check list both of them or one of them (according to your needs) then click install.
• Microsoft VSCode, skip this installation if you don’t to install this software.
• Your Anaconda already installed, this is time to try our anaconda. Go to start and find anaconda. Double click to run it.

• Now choose Jupyter Notebooks, then click Launch and wait until we open our local server. Note: Environment is a menu when we can install and uninstall our package library.
• Click new and choose Python 3, you can start your first python project now.

Start your first python project by creating diamond start like picture above, you can use the my snippet code or make your own. Coding doesn’t need to be memorized, but it needs practice every day. Happy coding guys 😄

Conclusion

This tutorial provided a quick guide on how to install Python and Anaconda on Windows as well as how to deal with common installation issues. If you would like to learn more about basic python, just access my python basic cheat sheet in this link. If you have any questions or thoughts on the tutorial, feel free to reach out in the comments below or through Twitter.