As I’m making my way through Natural Language Processing with Python and Data Science from Scratch: First Principles with Python, the first step is to set up the development environment.

My first attempt was to install numpy, python, nltk, matplotlib, IPython, etc, one at a time. However, I hit a few clashes between Python versions, so switched to Anaconda instead:

1. Download Anaconda
2. From the download folder, execute
   1. sh <name of downloaded file>
   2. Accept the defaults, but answer yes to preprend to PATH
3. To check it works, start Python
   1. import numpy
   2. import pandas
   3. import matplotlib
4. Download the nltk assets. Start Python and enter:
   1. import nltk
   2. nltk.download()
   3. use GUI to download “all”