Anaconda is a freemium open source distribution of the Python programming language for large-scale data processing, predictive analytics, and scientific computing, that aims to simplify package management and deployment. It is also the world's most popular Python data science platform, with over 4.5 million users and 1,000 data science packages. It is not to be confused with conda, a package manager that is installed with Anaconda.

For this book, we recommend installing and using Anaconda as it provides you everything you need—Python itself, Python libraries, the tools to manage these libraries, a Python environment manager, and the Jupyter Notebook application to write, edit, and run your code. You can also choose to use an alternative to Anaconda or install Python through www.python.org/downloads and use any IDE of your choice combined with a package manager such as pip (covered as we proceed further). We recommend using Python version 3.6.