Nikhil Palanki

I've always been fascinated by the intersection between human phenomena and computing, specifically in fields of education, financial markets, and creative design. My programming interests are in machine learning, artificial intelligence, neural networks, cryptography, blockchain infrastructure, market making, simulation and modeling, and quantum computing. Outside of ByteRevel, I co-founded and spent four years working on a software consulting company, Quadral Apps (It's now defunct as the founders have all left). My interests outside of computer science are poverty alleviation, humanitarian engineering, education, financial markets and economics research.

Python Basics 101 – Part I: Installing Pip

1 minute read

In this set of tutorials, I will demonstrate how to get oriented with the Python programming language. Over the past few months, I have grown acquainted with the language. The uses of Python extend into many disciplines, such as research, academics, game development, and web application development. The Python language is rooted in cleanliness of code, organization, and execution. If you are unfamiliar with programming, you will find Python a great place to start in order to craft useful applications.

Now, I’m going to assume that you have Python already installed onto your computer. Since I am a Mac user, the following tutorial will have a bias towards setting Pip up on a Mac system.

Installing Pip

Pip is a package manager for Python. What is a package? Well, developers throughout the world are constantly developing new Python-based technologies to make development, analysis, research, or testing easier (just to name a few uses). These packages range from analysis based tools to internet web bindings (if these terms don’t make sense that’s okay – once you start building Python code and experimenting with the language, you’ll understand heuristically the terminology).

Pip is a useful little tool that allows you to install packages easily and globally. This means, from an Python text editor or IDE, you can import a package into your Python script.

To install Pip, first download the get-pip.py file from here. Next, open up Terminal or Command Line on your computer. Navigate to the directory containing the get-pip.py file (which is probably the Downloads folder). When you are in the directory type in the following:

 

Screen Shot 2014-06-24 at 11.17.00 AM After typing in the command, Terminal should be installing Pip. If you successfully installed Pip, the following should appear at the bottom: Screen Shot 2014-06-24 at 11.20.27 AM

Congratulations, you installed the package manager!

 

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