Software
Some of the home work problems for this course requires you to complete a Python 2.7 script, and then submit an answer based on the result it generates. In order to be able to use these programs, you need to have an installation of Python and some of the common scientific libraries (NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib) . We offer you several options:
We have created a virtual machine image, where all the required libraries and Ninja-IDE (an open-source python IDE) come pre-installed on an Xubuntu 14.04 system. Here are the download links for this virtual box image:
username: chaos password: book
In order to be able to use this virtual machine you need to have VirtualBox installed on your system. You can download VirtualBox from here.
While obtaining SciPy stack is fairly straightforward for common operating systems, availability of various distributions can sometime make things complicated. See this page for specific instructions for your system.
If you are a Windows or Mac OS user, we recommend you to install Anaconda Python 2.7, on which we tested our programs.
If you are a Linux user, you are likely to have the option of downloading required Python libraries from the software repositories that your distribution uses. This page has specific commands for installing SciPy stack on most common distros. Some repositories may have older versions of the NumPy, SciPy, and/or, matplotlib, in order to make sure that you have the most recent version of these libraries you may use pip to update packages:
pip install --upgrade PackageName
Read the comments in Python scripts even if you are writing your own code - they complement the exercise text.