Reading, and a "don't panic" message
08 Sep 2016Just as note of reassurance, let me point out that the readings for tomorrow are sections 5 and 1 of chapter 1 of the NLTK book. While section 5 pretty much stands on its own, section 1 kind of assumes you’re following along at a Python prompt.
My intention for tomorrow is to talk about section 1, and actually walk through it and related material while you are at a Python prompt on the computers in the classroom. If you don’t have Python installed at home, that’s ok. I wanted you to read through section 1 so that it’s not all a surprise to you as we do it in class, but in those places where it doesn’t reveal what Python’s telling you in response, you’ll find out soon enough.
Generally, as the class proceeds, it will probably be very useful to have a Python prompt at hand while reading through the material. That’s how the book was written to be read, as a guide to exploring the tools. But if you haven’t succeeded in installing Python/NLTK on your own computer yet, it’s fine. I would suggest you attempt it, and we can work together to try to troubleshoot your endeavors to get it installed (since if you don’t have it at home, it’ll come to be necessary to come into the computer lab outside of class time to work through some of the homework and readings), but for the moment just reading enough to get the gist of what we’ll go through more systematically in class is perfectly good enough.