Learning Python

Chapter 1. Getting Started

This chapter starts with a nontechnical introduction to Python and then takes a quick look at ways to run Python programs. Its main goal is to get you set up to run Python code on your own machine, so you can work along with the examples and exercises in the later chapters. Along the way, we’ll study the bare essentials of Python configuration—just enough to get started. You don’t have to work along with the book on your own, but we strongly encourage it if possible. Even if you can’t, this chapter will be useful when you do start coding on your own.

We’ll also take a quick first look at Python module files here. Most of the examples you see early in the book are typed at Python’s interactive interpreter command-line. Code entered this way goes away as soon as you leave Python. If you want to save your code in a file, you need to know a bit about Python modules, so module fundamentals are introduced here. We’ll save most module details for a later chapter.

Why Python?

If you’ve bought this book, chances are you already know what Python is, and why it’s an important tool to learn. If not, you probably won’t be sold on Python until you’ve learned the language by reading the rest of this book. But before jumping into details, we’d like to use a few pages to briefly introduce some of the main reasons behind Python’s popularity. (Even if you don’t care for nontechnical overviews, your manager might.)

An Executive Summary

Python is perhaps best described as an object-oriented ...