Читать книгу Introduction to Python Programming for Business and Social Science Applications - Frederick Kaefer - Страница 25

A package manager is a program to install libraries of code. These libraries, or packages, contain previously developed code. Once installed, the code found in the package is available to other Python code, saving a great deal of time and effort. Using a package not only prevents “reinventing the wheel” but also usually benefits from the prior development and testing by an entire community of developers. Python comes with a package manager named pip already installed (in Versions 3.4 and later). The Python Software Foundation, a nonprofit company, maintains documentation for pip, which is online at the website https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/. We will be using pip to install several packages throughout this textbook.

Another way to set up a Python development environment is to install a Python distribution, such as the Anaconda distribution, found at the following URL: https://www.anaconda.com/download/. Python distributions are alternative bundles and are modified packages that include additional functionality. Alternative bundles may not include the latest versions of Python or other libraries and are not maintained by the core Python team (Python Software Foundation, 2019, “Alternative bundles”). We use the pip package manager to install individual packages in this textbook. Learning to install individual packages is an important skill for people programming in Python, which enables the use of packages developed for use within organizations and for packages that are not in any Python distributions.

Lessons learned: In this section, we learned how to use package managers for convenient organization and management of libraries of code. Learning to install individual packages is an important skill to take advantage of the Python packages for both business and social sciences purposes that are available to the Python programming community.