I explored all the possible IDEs (except pycharm- is paid) and all three distributions. My personal choice is Anaconda with spyder (mainly because it gives a one point access to all updates/packages, plus allows me to switch between 2.7 and 3.1 environments). Numpy, Scipy, Pandas, Matplotlibe is all that I require for most of my jobs. Anyway, there already exists a long discussion on stackoverflow reg. the relative meriits and demerits-

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15762943/anaconda-vs-epd-enthought-vs-manual-installation-of-python

I explored all the possible IDEs (except pycharm- is paid) and all three distributions. My personal choice is Anaconda with spyder (mainly because it gives a one point access to all updates/packages, plus allows me to switch between 2.7 and 3.1 environments). Numpy, Scipy, Pandas, Matplotlibe is all that I require for most of my jobs. Anyway, there already exists a long discussion on stackoverflow reg. the relative meriits and demerits-

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15762943/anaconda-vs-epd-enthought-vs-manual-installation-of-python

thanks NN Misra

Both Canopy and Anaconda provide you a basic Python distribution with commonly used packages like NumPy, SciPy, Pandas, matplotlib, etc. already installed.

Anaconda gives you a Python distribution and a package manager. The good things about Anaconda is that it supports both Python 2 & 3, which Canopy right now does not.