I tend to use the Anaconda Python distribution, it makes life a little easier by including all the data science packages I like to use (NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, pandas, Jupyter Notebook and scikit-learn). While I predominantly use Linux Anaconda apparently makes life a lot easier in a Windows or Mac environment.

The package manage for Anaconda is conda (command line) and there is now a GUI interface available (called anaconda-navigator). To run the navigator type anaconda-navigator at the command line.

to check if conda is installed (or which version):

conda –version

conda info

to update Anaconda to the latest version:

conda update conda

The installation of Anaconda adds a new path to the beginning of the environment variable PATH ensuring that anaconda bin will be utilised before the standard python bin.