The IPython notebook runs in the browser, and works best in Google Chrome. The Anaconda Python distribution is an easily-installable bundle of Python and many commonly used libraries. Download the appropriate version of Anaconda here.

Extra libraries that are useful for python:

1. BeautifulSoup
2. Pattern
3. Seaborn
4. MrJob

The recommended way to install these packages is to run pip install BeautifulSoup mrjob pattern seaborn on the command line. If this doesn't work, you can download the source code, and run python setup.py install from the source code directory. On Unix machines, either of these commands may require sudo (i.e. sudo pip install... or sudo python)

1. Learning Python (5th Edition) by Mark Lutz
2. Python for Data Analysis by Wes McKinney
3. Introduction to Python for Econometrics, Statistics and Data Analysis by Kevin Sheppard