Anaconda Miniconda Cheatsheet for Data Scientists
Anaconda is a technical package manager for data scientists. It manages virtual environments for data science. It is a distribution of commonly used libraries and software. It can save hours of configuration for windows users. It is also an essential prerequisite for deep learning and AI tasks. Makes configuring libraries much easier on both windows and mac. It is a bit bulky 500MBs+ but it is data scientists’ friend and must have toolkit in academia. Researchers use anaconda to manage their packages, instead of Python pip all the time. While pip is the general python package manager, Anaconda can install other libraries and is not python-specific. Anaconda can also be used as a virtual environment manager much like virtualenv and pyenv .
Anaconda “leading open data science platform powered by Python”
Miniconda is a lite version (light version) of anaconda. It takes less space but has the essentials of a data scientist toolset. Udacity sometimes suggests its students install miniconda.
Install Anaconda if you are getting started, and don’t want to spend too much time configuring, and that space and performance on the computer is not an issue. You have a powerful machine. Or you want all the dependencies — data science libraries available right away. Definitely can try…
