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Python Resources

Requirements

In CS178, we will use Python for the programming portions of the homework assignments. The course assignments will additionally depend on the SciPy stack Links to an external site., a set of Python libraries and tools for scientific computing. The first discussion section will include a tutorial introduction to Python.

All of the examples and support code for assignments will be written in Python 3. 

Installation

We highly recommend installing the Anaconda Python distribution, which includes the full SciPy stack as well as a number of other useful tools. You can freely download the distribution here Links to an external site..  We recommend using the Python 3.8 version for this course.

Running and Submitting Python Code

We also recommend using Jupyter notebooks Links to an external site. for course assignments, as these notebooks provide a convenient environment both for writing/executing code, and for formatting solutions. Jupyter notebooks are designed specifically for data science applications and natively support plotting with the MatPlotLib library. The discussion sections will provide examples of how to use Jupyter notebooks together with the mltools package.

Jupyter is included with Anaconda and can be launched from the Anaconda navigator application. To export a PDF file for online submission, we recommend that you:

  1. From the Jupyter menus, choose "File > Print Preview".  This should produce a new webpage where all of your answers are visible.
  2. Once you've checked your answers, from your browser menu (we use Chrome) choose "File > Print" (or a similar command) and then print to a pdf.
  3. Verify that your printed pdf is multiple pages, not one giant page.

This approach is easier to setup, and tends to work better, than using internal Jupyter commands/menus to export directly to pdf.