Setting up a development environment

I've mostly used my work machine for data science training, since it had many of the utilities I needed already, and also it was a computation beast. But I wanted to get my Macbook Pro into a condition to be my main development machine, since (1) it's portable, and (2) I don't work there no more.

For the most part, I followed steps 2-8 of the tutorial here to set up the environment, skipping the system preferences and stopping before installing C++, Ruby, and other developer software. I'll get there eventually, but I'm taking baby steps. I also already have LaTeX running on the Macbook, so I didn't need that.

Step 6 is the installation of Sublime Text, which is a pretty rad text editor. You can use the "evaluation version" for free forever, or you can pay the $70 to register it. It does a lot of cool stuff, including automatically setting the syntax for whatever programming language you're using. For example, if I create a new file and save it with the extension *.py, I can create a function by typing "def", and Sublime Text fills in the following:

Everything has been marked up in color, and the proper function syntax has been filled in. The tutorial includes the installation of various packages that set the color scheme, as well as mark up possible errors in the program. The red block indicates a perceived error, where it's worried that there's a tab in the line (there is, but it's equivalent to four spaces, which is the correct syntax).

You can also run programs from Sublime Text using its console:

Note the bit at the bottom. Once I wrote the function and called it, I used Sublime Text's "build" command with Python.

Step 8 in the tutorial involves the installation of MySQL, which I'll talk more about in a future post. Today I went through a couple of tutorials, and to be honest, it took me a while to get it working. In short, SQL is a language for interacting with databases. To use it, you need some databases, which are typically stored on a "server," which can just be your computer. There are several programs that can be used to maintain and interact with these database servers, and MySQL is one of them. It's open source, and the community edition is free. Here is an SQL tutorial, and here is another one.

I think I have the essentials set up now. My original goal today was to learn the basics of SQL and start a mini-project. Hopefully I'll get to the mini-project this weekend.