This chapter is taken from the book A Primer on Scientific Programming with Python by H. P. Langtangen, 5th edition, Springer, 2016.
Installing software on your laptop: Mac OS X and Windows
There are various possibilities for installing the software on a Mac OS
X or Windows platform:
- Use
.dmg (Mac) or .exe (Windows) files to install individual packages
- Use Homebrew or MacPorts to install packages (Mac only)
- Use a pre-built rich environment for scientific computing in Python:
- Use a virtual machine running Ubuntu:
Alternative 1 is the obvious and perhaps simplest approach, but
usually requires quite some competence about the operating system as a
long-term solution when you need many more Python packages than the
basic three. This author is not particularly enthusiastic
about Alternative 2. If you
anticipate to use Python extensively in your work, I strongly
recommend operating Python on an Ubuntu platform and going for Alternative
4 because that is the easiest and most flexible way to build and
maintain your own software ecosystem. Alternative 3 is recommended
for those who are uncertain about the future needs for Python and
think Alternative 4 is too complicated. My preference is then to use
Anaconda for the Python installation and Spyder (comes with Anaconda) as a
graphical interface with editor, an output area, and flexible ways of
running Python programs.