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Install and Configuration

Python on Windows

Package Installation

There are a number of ways to install 3rd-party libraries for Python. Generally, the easiest method is to use a package manager that can also handle the downloading/installation of dependencies (additional libraries that a particular module might depend on). Below are the two standard package managers for Python:

• easy_install - the classic package manager that is part of the setuptools library
• pip, the emerging standard for Python package management

Learning Python, Discussion Leaders

• Chapters 1-3: On your own
• Chapter 4 - Dave Gulliver
• Chapter 5 - Chris Schnaars
• Chapter 6 - ???
• Chapter 7 - ???
• Chapter 8 - ???
• Chapter 9 - ???
• Chapter 10 - ???

Tutorials

• Install/Config (Serdar)
• Python's Interactive Interpreter: A Sandbox for Exploring Data and Code (Serdar)
• Working with CSVs (Serdar)
• Working with Excel (Serdar)
• Working with Databases (Serdar)
• Data Wrangling 101: Scrape, Clean, Output (Serdar) -- Demonstrate how to scrape data from a multi-level website, perform some basic data cleaning and processing, and then output data as CSV and/or insert into a database. Aron Pilhofer has volunteered a test site with data for scraping

Resources

Web Scraping

• ScraperWiki contains tuts, sample code, and even lets you ask others to write a scraper for you (though why would we ever do that, right?)
• An Introduction to Compassionate Screen Scraping, by Will Larson. This is a very good intro to scraping sites in a responsible way.
• [[Python Recipe: Grab page, scrape table, download file|http://www.palewire.com/posts/2008/04/20/python-recipe-grab-a-page-scrape-a-table-download-a-file/], by Ben Welsh