I'm noticing no mention of virtual environments/venv. This is something I notice a lot of (Python) junior data scientists and data engineers struggle with. It's very important to set up environments properly (and following best practices) to avoid version collisions, global scope pollution, etc.
Great work, though! I'm also using bookdown (I instantly recognized the template) for a book I've been working on and it's a pleasure to use. Would love to see a blog post on how you marketed the book and how your sales are doing once the ball gets rolling!
Given how fragmented virtual environments are in python is which is the most popular currently? Last I looked there was venv, pyenv, pipenv, pipx, poetry and pipsi.
Haven't done any python work in a while but am curious to know what people use. Starting right now, I'd probably just stick with venv, though guessing the others do offer some extra benefits.
The virtual environment part isn't really very fragmented at all -- I believe all of those use virtualenv/venv under the hood for that and just add layers of additional features for package and/or interpreter management. (that part is where the fragmentation happens, especially packages.)
The virtualenv/venv decision pretty much boils down to are you py3 only? Use the venv module in the standard library. Do you still support py2? Then virtualenv.
I see conda a lot more for new python coders in the machine learning space, having a GUI helps newer programmers. Check out Anaconda/Miniconda. Code is as simple as
Virtual environments are useful when setting up a single machine, but many of the tools covered in the book do not directly support venv, such as Lambda functions, Cloud Dataflow, and Databricks. In general, the goal is to get readers to explore tools beyond Conda for setting up environments and dependencies.
Marketing will be a challenge. There's been great reception here, but I expect sales to taper quickly and then paid sponsorship will be necessary to continue generating sales. I'm currently testing out Amazon Advertising, but I don't seem to have bids high enough to get to my target budget.
Great work, though! I'm also using bookdown (I instantly recognized the template) for a book I've been working on and it's a pleasure to use. Would love to see a blog post on how you marketed the book and how your sales are doing once the ball gets rolling!