This book is designed for complete beginners and people who have just started to learn to code. It does not require any specific knowledge besides basic computer literacy.  

The execution of the code examples provided in this book requires an installation of Python 3.7.3 or later on macOS, Linux, or Microsoft Windows. The code presented throughout the book makes use of many Python libraries. In each chapter, a list of required libraries is given at the beginning. A full list of libraries is stored in the GitHub repository, in the environment.yaml file. The same file can be used to install Python and all of the required libraries in bulk—full instructions are given in Chapter 1, Preparing the Workspace. 

The code for this book was developed in and extensively uses two development environments—VS Code editor with its Python bundle, and Jupyter. We recommend using both for better alignment with the book's narrative.

The code for Chapter 6, First Script – Geocoding with Web APIs, Chapter 7, Scraping Data from the Web with Beautiful Soup 4, Chapter 11, Data Cleaning and Manipulation, and Chapter 16, Data Pipelines with Luigi, requires an internet connection.

The first chapter will provide you with step-by-step instructions and some useful tips for setting up your Python environment, the core libraries, and all the necessary tools.