Job Ready Python

Lesson 1Setting Up a Python Programming Environment

As mentioned in the introduction, this book is designed to give you a thorough understanding of the Python programming language and its rich set of libraries, and to expose you to application development using Python. In order to do this, you'll need a tool to enter and run your Python programs. In this first lesson, we point to tools and show you how to get started using them.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

By the end of this lesson, you will:

• Know of a few Python tools that are available.
• Learn where you can access an online Python tool to enter and run Python scripts.
• Create and run your first Python script.

NOTE Don't worry if you don't understand some of the jargon and code presented in this lesson. Rather, focus on setting up your programming environment as described in this lesson. The rest of this book will focus on teaching you the jargon and code!

PYTHON OVERVIEW

Python is a general-purpose programming language that is interpreted. Python balances ease and comprehension with power and speed. With its focus on speed for developing applications, it has become a significant tool for software development. When working with Python, you write programs that are then executed using Python. The programs are generally saved as text files with a .py extension and interpreted using the Python program.

Because Python is open source, there are several development environments and distributions that can be used to write Python ...