Author here. Although the software contained in the base is indeed relatively easy to install, you'd be surprised how often people struggle installing Python an

Author here. Although the software contained in the base is indeed relatively easy to install, you'd be surprised how often people struggle installing Python and its packages on Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows! The initial reason I created DST was that I'm currently writing a book called Data Science at the Command Line. Installing the command-line tools discussed in this book is unfortunately not straightforward. I wanted to offer potential readers a Vagrant box (with a shell provisioner) that installs these command-line tools. Similar to what Matthew Russell has done for his book Mining the Social Web [1]. This blog post [2] provides some more explanation and compares four different solutions. The software packages that you mention sure are exciting! If there is an author or teacher that wants to teach these to her readers or students, then we should create a bundle (i.e., Ansible playbook) for them! [1] https://github.com/ptwobrussell/Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Edition https://github.com/ptwobrussell/Mining-the-Social-Web-2nd-Ed... [2] http://jeroenjanssens.com/2013/12/07/lean-mean-data-science-machine.html http://jeroenjanssens.com/2013/12/07/lean-mean-data-science-...