Update 2015: Nowadays I always recommend Anaconda. It includes lots of Python packages for scientific computing, data science, web development, etc. It also provides a superior environment tool, conda
, which allows to easily switch between environments, even between Python 2 and 3. It is also updated very quickly as soon as a new version of a package is released, and you can just do conda update packagename
to update it.
Original answer below:
On Windows, what is complicated is to compile the math packages, so I think a manual install is a viable option only if you are interested only in Python
, without other packages.
Therefore better chose either EPD (now Canopy) or Anaconda.
Anaconda has around 270 packages, including the most important for most scientific applications and data analysis, that is, NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, IPython, matplotlib, Scikit-learn. So if this is enough for you, I would choose Anaconda.
Instead, if you are interested in other packages, and even more if you use any of the Enthought packages (Chaco for example is very useful for realtime data visualization), then EPD/Canopy is probably a better choice. The Academic version has a larger number of packages in the base install, and many more in the repository. Anaconda also includes Chaco.