TensorFlow in Action

This project is the code repository for TensorFlow in Action.

IMPORTANT: You will need to have Visual Studio installed. Make sure your installation has Windows SDK

Video Guides for Installation

• Windows installation guide on YouTube
• Linux installation guide on YouTube

Prerequisites (If you want GPU support)

• Install the latest NVIDIA driver for your GPU from this page
• Install CUDA 11.2 (TensorFlow 2.9.1)
• Setup CuDNN (v8.2 for CUDA 11.2)
• Make sure your $PATH variable contains the path to the bin folder of cuda (e.g. On Windows - C:\CUDA\v11.2\bin)
  • On UNIX - Set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to lib64 folder (e.g. /usr/local/cuda-11.2/lib64)

Creating a Virtual Environment (Anaconda) (Recommended)

• Install Anaconda
• Open up Anaconda Prompt
• Setup a conda virtual environment with conda create -n manning.tf2 python=3.9
• Activate the environment with conda activate manning.tf2
• Install the required libraries using pip install -r requirements.txt

Creating a Virtual Environment (virtualenv)

• Install Python 3.9 by following instructions on the webpage. Make sure it is added to the PATH variable.
• To verify the installation of Python3.9, go to the command line terminal and type python and press enter. You should see a message similar to the following.

   Python 3.9.0 (...) [...] on ...
   Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
  

• Type exit() to exit the Python interpreter.
• Run pip3 install virtualenv to install Python virtual environment package
• Go to where you would like the virtual env created (e.g. cd C:\Users\<user>\Documents\code\python_venvs) and type python -m venv manning.tf2. You should see a directory called manning.tf2 created in the directory you are in.
• Now to activate the virtual environment, from the directory you were originally in (e.g. C:\Users\<user>\Documents\code\python_venvs),
  • On Windows - Run manning.tf2\Scripts\activate.bat
  • On UNIX - Run source manning.tf2\bin\activate
• If successfully activated, you should see a (manning.tf2) in front of the normal prompt you get in the command line interface (CLI).
• Now run pip install -r requirements.txt to install all the necessary packages

Tutorial on virtual environments: Here

Important notes

• For some plotting capability provided in TensorFlow/Keras, you have installed a Python package called graphviz (Installation instructions). Make sure you add it to your $PATH variable.

Getting Jupyter Notebook server up

Now you are ready to run the Jupyter notebook server, allowing you to run the notebooks provided in the code repository.

• Open up the command line terminal and activate the virtual environment manning.tf2 if you haven't already
• Go in to the directory you downloaded code to using cd in the CLI (e.g. cd C:\Users\<user>\Documents\code\manning_tf2_in_action)
• Run jupyter notebook in the CLI
• This should open up the jupyter notebook server's landing page on your default browser
• Now you can navigate the folder structure within that directory, open any notebook and run it.