Anaconda is an environment manager. On OS-X and Linux, there is usually a default python installation. You can use that, however, if you do something that messes it up, then you're in a bit of a tight spot. Also, you might find yourself working on multiple projects that require different versions of the same project. The solution is to install an environment manager so you can easily switch between different environments. The two most popular python environment managers are Anaconda and virtualenv.
For this p-learn, you'll want to install Anaconda from here.
Once you have anaconda, you'll want to set up an environment for this class.
conda create --name plearn python=3.5
Once the environment has been created, then you need to activate it:
source activate plearn # plearn is the name set up in the previous line.
Every time you start a new shell, you'll want to activate whatever environment you want to work in. To see what environments you have available to you:
conda env list
If you're done with working in a particular environment, you can deactivate it:
source deactivate plearn
Once you have an environment set up, we can test to see if it is working by invoking the interactive interpreter...
python
You should get something that looks like:
Python 3.5.2 |Continuum Analytics, Inc.| (default, Jul 2 2016, 17:52:12)
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 4.2 (clang-425.0.28)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>
From here, you can issue commands just as you would in a python script. It's super nice for just messing around with things to see how it works. You can also quickly check what python version you are working with (python 3.5.2 for me!).
I tend to use this cheat-sheet when I want to look up commands for anaconda.
Now that we have python set up, lets look at a very basic python program.