Jupyter notebooks are used throughout this course and Anaconda is used to set up a conda environment for the notebooks. Alternatively, you can also use Google's Colaboratory to work with the notebooks.

Anaconda

In order to install Anaconda, go to https://www.anaconda.com/distribution/ and download the Python 3.7 version. If you already have it installed, you can just downgrade Python like below.

Conda Environment

This is how to install and setup your conda environment inside the Anaconda Prompt/Terminal

conda create -n cmis python=3.7
conda activate cmis
conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda install meshplot
conda install ipympl
conda install igl
conda install wildmeshing
conda install jupyter

When you want to run the Jupyter notebook you have to do

conda activate cmis
jupyter notebook

Anaconda issues

New MAC chips

Since Python 3.8 had been released for about a year when Apple Silicon hit the market, Python 3.7 builds for osx-arm64 were never part of the regular build matrix for Conda Forge. This means we need to find a work around for this. Replace the first line in the code box above with the following:

## create empty environment 
 conda create -n cmis 
 ## activate 
 conda activate cmis 
 ## use x86_64 architecture channel(s) 
 conda config --env --set subdir osx-64 
 ## install python, numpy, etc. (add more packages here...) 
 conda install python=3.7

Jupyter notebook not opening

In some cases the Jupyter client gives issue. Go to your Anaconda Prompt/Terminal and enter the cmis environemnt. Once in your cmis environment, it helps to upgrade the jupyter_client like below:

pip install --upgrade jupyter_client

 Python Tips in General

 The official site offers documentation, tutorials, references to books, etc.

The last two links are excellent books, freely available online with Jupyter notebooks for the examples.