August 2016
Beginner
338 pages
7h 58m
English
Content preview from The Hitchhiker's Guide to Python
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 2. Properly Installing Python
This chapter walks through CPython installation on the Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows platforms. Sections on packaging tools (like Setuptools and pip) are repetitive, so you should skip straight to the section for your particular operating system, and ignore the others.
If you are part of an organization that recommends you use a commercial Python distribution, such as Anaconda or Canopy, you should follow your vendor’s instructions. There is also a small note for you in “Commercial Python Redistributions”.
Caution
If Python already exists on your system,
do not, on any account, allow anybody to change the
symbolic link to the python executable to point at anything
other than what it is already pointing at.
That would be almost as bad as reading
Vogon poetry
out loud. (Think of the system-installed code that
depends on a specific Python in a specific place…)
Installing Python on Mac OS X
The latest version of Mac OS X, El Capitan, comes with its own Mac-specific implementation of Python 2.7.
You don’t need to install or configure anything else to use Python. But we strongly recommend installing Setuptools, pip, and virtualenv before you start building Python applications for real-world use (i.e., contributing to collaborative projects). You’ll learn more about these tools and how to install them later in this section. In particular, you should always install Setuptools, as it makes it much easier for you to use other third-party Python libraries. ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access
More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.