B.1 Python installation

The first order of business is to make sure that you have a recent version of Python installed. By recent, I mean one of the last two minor version; as of February 2022, these are versions 3.10 and 3.9.

To check your default Python version, just type python -V (note the captial) at the terminal command line (not the R command line). This is what I see:

> python -V
Python 3.10.2

There is a variety of strategies for managing Python on your computer, perhaps the simplest is to go to the Python downloads page, then go from there.