These notebooks aim at teaching you the fundamentals of Python3 and the following libraries: Numpy, matplotlib, pandas.

First, you will need to install git, if you don't have it already.

Next, clone this repository by opening a terminal and typing the following commands:

 $ cd development/  # or whatever your  development directory is
 $ git clone https://github.com/sachin80/nps_tutorials.git
 $ cd nps_tutorials

If you do not want to install git, you can instead download master.zip, unzip it, rename the resulting directory to nps_tutorials and move it to your development directory.

When using Anaconda, you can optionally create an isolated Python environment dedicated to this project. This is recommended as it makes it possible to have a different environment for each project (e.g. one for this project), with potentially different libraries and library versions:

 $ conda create -n mltutorials python=3.6 anaconda
 $ conda activate mltutorials

This creates a fresh Python 3.6 environment called mltutorials (you can change the name if you want to), and it activates it. This environment contains all the scientific libraries that come with Anaconda. This includes all the libraries we will need (NumPy, Matplotlib, Pandas, Jupyter and a few others), except for TensorFlow, so let's install it:

 $ conda install -n mltutorials -c conda-forge tensorflow

This installs the latest version of TensorFlow available for Anaconda (which is usually not the latest TensorFlow version) in the mltutorials environment (fetching it from the conda-forge repository). If you chose not to create an mltutorials environment, then just remove the -n mltutorials option.

Next, you can optionally install Jupyter extensions. These are useful to have nice tables of contents in the notebooks, but they are not required.

 $ conda install -n mltutorials -c conda-forge jupyter_contrib_nbextensions

If you want to use the Jupyter extensions (optional, they are mainly useful to have nice tables of contents), you first need to install them:

 $ jupyter contrib nbextension install --user

Okay! You can now start Jupyter, simply type:

 $ jupyter notebook

This should open up your browser, and you should see Jupyter's tree view, with the contents of the current directory. If your browser does not open automatically, visit localhost:8888. Click on index.ipynb to get started!