There have been problems reported with Anaconda on Windows and performance probably depends on your machine and IT regulations. A good alternative if you're having trouble with Anaconda is a Windows only distribution called Python(x,y). A nice (free) introduction to Python with instructions for setting up Python(x,y), Anaconda, etc. can be found here: http://quant-econ.net/learning_python.html. 

cheers,
Kyle
________________________________________
From: Political Methodology Society [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of [log in to unmask] [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, 3 June 2014 4:56 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [POLMETH] web scraping etc - Anaconda

For those interested in learning Python, there is a newer free distribution called Anaconda that we used in my text as data class this quarter.

The download includes about 400 python packages, which eliminates much of the hassle of installing packages individually, and it also include the i-python notebook, which I really like.

There have been a few glitches, but nothing compared to the challenges we have faced getting python installed on different machines with different configurations.



John D. Wilkerson
Box 353530
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195

phone 206-543-8030
fax 206-685-2146

cappp.org

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