Okay.
So in this lecture, I want to give you guys a little bit of a disclaimer before we proceed to the installation
lectures.
So the thing you have to keep in mind is that these installation lectures are only guidelines.
Okay?
These are generic lectures that I created at one point in time to cover all my courses at once.
And obviously this is the most scalable way to distribute such lectures because I don't want to have
to create another lecture installing stuff from scratch every single time I create a course, which
is pretty often.
So just to give you guys a little bit of history about why this lecture exists, in fact, this lecture
never used to exist.
So when I first created my courses, I didn't have any installation lectures because I didn't know that
people didn't know how to install Python.
And this is because Python was a prerequisite to those courses.
So basically if you came to the course and you didn't know how to install Python or install Python libraries,
you basically failed to meet the prerequisites.
Now, because I'm such a nice person, I decided to include an installation lecture eventually to handle
these cases.
So I was honestly surprised that people trying to get into machine learning didn't know how to install
Python.
Okay, this is kind of like learning Python today and then trying to learn machine learning tomorrow,
right?
That's a that's a very compressed way of learning machine learning.
And that's not generally how it works in the real world.
Okay.
So in the real world, how it's usually going to happen is you're going to learn Python first.
So you're going to have so you're going to have a pretty good handle on Python syntax writing basic
programs in Python, maybe even not basic programs like more complicated programs.
But in general, you know, installing Python is like the first step of that.
So if you don't know how to install Python and you don't know how to use Python, how are you even going
to implement a complicated machine learning algorithm in Python, you know, two days after learning
Python?
I don't think that's realistic.
So one of the things you have to keep in mind is my famous rule, which applies to a lot of things in
this course, is learn the principles, not the syntax.
Okay?
So what this means is it's more about understanding what we are doing and why we are doing it.
Okay?
It's about understanding.
Whereas if you're focused solely on the syntax, okay, what this means is that you're probably taking
a more monkey see monkey do approach, which is not correct.
It's not about just typing exactly character for character.
What I typed, it's more about understanding.
So for example, I show you how to install a few libraries using PIP, so it's pip install, blah blah
blah.
So this doesn't mean you're going to install every library I installed.
This means I'm showing you how to install a library so that if you come across a library that you need
that you haven't yet installed, now you know how to install it.
Okay.
So that's sort of understanding the theme of what we are doing rather than just rote copying of the
characters that I'm typing on the screen, which doesn't require any understanding at all.
Okay.
So it's understanding that's important.
So if you're understanding, that's good.
And if you're not understanding, that's not good.
Okay.
So as an example of this, in these lectures, you're going to see me install some libraries called
Cntk and Theano, both of which are no longer maintained.
So Theano was the first deep learning library to take advantage of the GPU in Python, which was the
most popular around maybe ten years ago.
And then we have S.a.k, which was Microsoft's Deep Learning library.
So don't install these.
These are just examples.
Another example is OpenAI Gym, which is used in some courses, but not all courses.
So you really want to pay attention to what course you're in.
For example, if you're in a reinforcement learning course where we are using OpenAI gym, then that's
a case where you'd want to install it.
If you're not in a reinforcement learning course and you have no idea what OpenAI Gym is, then don't
install it.