Installing Enthought Canopy

This book uses Python as its programming language, so the first thing you need is a Python development environment installed on your PC. If you don't have one already, just open up a web browser and head on to https://www.enthought.com/, and we'll install Enthought Canopy:

Enthought Canopy is just my development environment of choice; if you have a different one already that's probably okay. As long as it's Python 3 or a newer environment, you should be covered, but if you need to install a new Python environment or you just want to minimize confusion, I'd recommend that you install Canopy. So, head up to the big friendly download Canopy button here and select your operating system and architecture:

For me, the operating system is going to be Windows (64-bit). Make sure you choose Python 3.5 or a newer version of the package. I can't guarantee the scripts in this book will work with Python 2.7; they are built for Python 3, so select Python 3.5 for your OS and download the installer:

There's nothing special about it; it's just your standard Windows Installer, or whatever platform you're on. We'll just accept the defaults, go through it, and allow it to become our default Python environment. Then, when we launch it for the first time, it will spend a couple of minutes setting itself up and all the Python packages that we need. You might want to read the license agreement before you accept it; that's up to you. We'll go ahead, start the installation, and let it run.

Once Canopy installer has finished installing, we should have a nice little Enthought Canopy icon sitting on our desktop. Now, if you're on Windows, I want you to right-click on the Enthought Canopy icon, go to Properties and then to Compatibility (this is on Windows 10), and make sure Run this program as an administrator is checked:

This will make sure that we have all the permissions we need to run our scripts successfully. You can now double-click on the file to open it up:

The next thing we need is a Java Development Kit because Spark runs on top of Scala and Scala runs on top of the Java Runtime environment.