Installing Anaconda, VSCode, and Git

To successfully complete the assignment and get your submission marked, you need to install the following three software as required.

• Anaconda: it is the most popular Python distribution for data science research. It deals with package compatibility and version control in a friendly way. The link for downloading anaconda is https://www.anaconda.com/.
• VSCode: it is a powerful and easy-to-use integrated development environment (IDE) made by Microsoft. We choose this IDE because it can integrate with GitHub Classroom, which allows us to distribute and collect assignments. The link for downloading VSCode is https://code.visualstudio.com/.
• Git: it s a version control tool. It is a prerequisite for using GitHub Classroom. he link for downloading Git ishttps://git-scm.com/download/win.

For all the above software, you may simply follow the default options to install them.

If you download the installer from the Anaconda website by default, you install the latest version of Python and a list of Python packages. However, these packages might not be compatible with the required Tensorflow for our course due to the potential version conflict. To avoid such an issue, we specify the exact version of Python and the required packages by providing a YML file. More specifically, you follow the following steps to create an environment from the environment.yml file provided in the course’s GitHub repository.

To create an environment:

1. Open Anaconda shell.
2. Run:
conda env create -f environment.yml
3. Activate the new environment: conda activate ml-course
4. Verify that the new environment was installed correctly: conda env list

Once you create the Python environment, you can activate this environment by opening the shell and running conda activate ml-course for future usage. To install another new package, you can run conda install new_package_name, or follow its installation guide.

Note: If the installation of Anaconda fails and the message is “Failed to create Anaconda menu”, then try anaconda 2019.03 from https://repo.anaconda.com/archive/.