Setting up the environment

To tackle the first week’s homework, we need:

• [ ] Python version 3.8 or superior.
• [ ] NumPy and Pandas packages (preferably the last version)
• [ ] Matplotlib or Seaborn (preferably the last version)
• [ ] Jupyter Notebooks

There are multiple ways to set up the environment, I’ll talk about two methods for Windows.

First method (Setting up the environment locally)

First, we can install Python locally. To do this, we need to download a Python release from the Python Downloads page. Once the Python setup is downloaded, we open it and follow the installation instructions.

Don’t forget include the option “Add python.exe to PATH”

The next step is create a virtual environment for the DataTalk.Club’s MLZoomcamp challenge. To do this, we need to install the virtualenv packages from your terminal:

pip install virtualenv

Create a new virtual environment:

python3 -m venv ml-zoomcamp

The next step is download Visual Studio Code Editor. We also need to install the Python extension for VSCode and activate the environment we set up earlier. To select an environment, use the Python: Select Interpreter command from the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P).

To work with Jupyter notebooks we need to install the Jupyter extension for VSCode. Afterward, we can create a Jupyter Notebook by running the Create: New Jupyter Notebook command from the Command Palette (Ctrl+Shift+P) or by creating a new .ipynb file in your workspace.

In this way, we already have two requirements to start the homework:

• [x] Python version 3.8 or superior.