[Chicago] MIT Python course and pylab installation.

[Rick Galbo]

 Doug,

Here is a good answer to your question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11469336/what-is-the-difference-between-pylab-and-pyplot

You seem to be doing things the right way and you will definitely come to
hate pip and all the joys it will bring you managing packages in python. It
is one of the more aggravating and amazing thing about the language.

A lot of times a package you want to install will have dependencies. This
is a package used by the package you are trying to install in its source
code.

Best of luck,
Rick Galbo

On Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 11:05 PM Lewit, Douglas <d-lewit at neiu.edu> wrote:

> 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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