Update

Looking at reading Math for Programmers - Paul Orland and in particular to see if this is going to be a good starting point for my son GitHub squiggla to move from having finished his school exams (math and other) to learn some programming. First up, althought I am an ASDF install all the things kind of guy I know that I don’t know much about the Python environment and maybe I stick to using Anaconda installed via Homebrew with

brew install --cask anaconda

That said I do recall doing some Python programming with another beginner programmer and they were doing a Scrimba course on python if I recall? Maybe that might be a better starting point for him? Right that was with GitHub tigger-b and at one point we played around with a rock, paper, scissors game in python https://github.com/saramic/python-web-app.

Continuing with the installation

the brew install seems to only download the installer? which I ran as such

sudo mkdir /usr/local/anaconda3
sudo chown $USER:staff /user/local/anaconda3

PREFIX=/usr/local/anaconda3 \
  /opt/homebrew/Caskroom/anaconda/2022.10/Anaconda3-2022.10-MacOSX-arm64.sh \
  -u

at the end of that it had updated my .zshrc file but not wanting conda to run everytime I opted to NOT auto_activate_base with

conda config --set auto_activate_base false

# which presumably just writes to the file ...
cat ~/.condarc
auto_activate_base: false

Starting a new shell I am initially in my ASDF “safe space” but I can activate a conda environment (and create new ones I suppose) to get all the pre-installed goodies that Anaconda gives me, for example Jupyter Notebooks

# ASDF Defaults
which python
  /Users/michael/.asdf/shims/python
python --version
  Python 3.9.6
jupyter notebook
  zsh: command not found: jupyter

# Activate conda
conda activate
(base) ➜  ~ which python
  /Users/michael/anaconda3/bin/python
(base) ➜  ~ python --version
  Python 3.9.13
(base) ➜  ~ jupyter notebook
  [I 2022-11-04 12:50:29.782 LabApp] JupyterLab extension loaded ...
  ...
  Serving notebooks from local directory: /Users/michael
  ...
  Jupyter Notebook 6.4.12 is running at:
  http://localhost:8888/?token=680...000
   or http://127.0.0.1:8888/?token=680...000
  Shutdown this notebook server (y/[n])? y

# Deactivate Conda
(base) ➜  ~ conda deactivate

# back to normal
which python
  /Users/michael/.asdf/shims/python

And back to the book. It seems that it will use a Jupyter Notebook for chapter 2 and the code is available at https://github.com/orlandpm/math-for-programmers. Following the first simple example led me to use the author written drawing and vector libraries to draw a dinosaur outline on a graph. Not sure how useful this will be to my son learning to code.