The ingredients I generally use for data exploration or analysis are,
- Python – for a programming language,
- JupyterLab – for a fantastic interactive browser-based development environment and
- SQL – if the data sits in a relational database.
Like Poorna Malavath, the youngest girl to climb Mt Everest says, “It is important to take the first step when you are headed to learn or achieve something“.
I am hoping these steps would help anyone who wishes to set up an environment to begin data exploration with Python.
Prerequisites
I recommend Python Tutorial if you are new to Python. There, you will learn about installation and several topics to help you familiarise with the language.
However, we will stick to simple things with Python in these sections. And provide helpful notes or pointers to additional documentation. So, you will be fine reading through!
It is expected that you have Anaconda – a Python distribution platform, set up on your laptop to follow along.
For the set up, we will complete below steps in this page – How I setup JupyterLab for Data Exploration in Python:
- Create a virtual conda environment
- Install required Python libraries
- Spin up JupyterLab that runs on the virtual environment we create
- Read in data into JupyterLab notebook
