[Chicago] MIT Python course and pylab installation.

[Lewit, Douglas]

Hello to all Pythonistas in the Chicago area.

I just completed the first of two MIT online courses in Python, and I was
very impressed with the quality of this course.  My only criticism is that
it seemed that a little too much time was given at the beginning of the
course for assignments, and by the end of the course not enough time was
given for the completion of programming assignments, exercises, etc, but of
course this is very often the case in many courses, whether they are online
or in a classroom.  But in general I thought this course was really good.
The video lectures were fantastic, the problem sets were highly instructive
and thought provoking, and I learned a lot about Python and programming in
general.  Excellent course.  I highly recommend it to anyone who is just
starting out with Python, and even experienced Python programmers might
benefit from a course such as this one.  The discussion forum was also
pretty good, although I didn't really take advantage of it very much.

On a different topic.... I just got done installing Python3.6 on my Linux
machine using *./configure*, then *make*, and then *sudo make install*.  It
worked great, no problems.  Then I used *pip3.6* to install the following
packages: *numpy*, *scipy* and also *matplotlib*.  What's rather curious to
me is that the *pylab* package also got installed!  But I didn't use pip to
install that package.  I think it just "piggy backed along" when I
installed matplotlib.  Is that normal behavior?  Can explicitly requested
packages implicitly request other packages when those packages serve as
dependencies?  *I'm guessing that pylab is a dependency for matplotlib*,
hence when I requested matplotlib, pip had to implicitly request the
installation of pylab as well, but here I'm just guessing.  My installation
"appears to be" pretty good, but.... I'm not extremely experienced with
installing stuff on Linux so I thought it might be a good idea to get some
advice from the Python pros out there.

Thanks in advance for the constructive feedback and I pray that everyone
has a wonderful, peaceful and productive week.

Best,

Douglas Lewit
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