Visual Studio Code for Python Programmers

CHAPTER 1Getting Started

When you began your Python development journey, you were most likely introduced to Python's Integrated Development and Learning Environment (IDLE). IDLE's simplicity is ideal for newcomers but leaves much to be desired by those who are more comfortable with the language and are in need of an efficient and productive workflow. A range of code editors and integrated development environments (IDEs) are available for Python development—some for general development with multilanguage support (such as Atom or Sublime) and others built exclusively for Python (such as PyCharm). Selecting a development environment is a matter of personal preference. As an experienced programmer, you might have already tried a few editors and thus are aware of what features you most desire. If you're in need of an extensible code editor that provides ample flexibility, efficiency, and productivity for managing Python source code, then Visual Studio Code is well worth your consideration.

Visual Studio Code (also referred to as VS Code) is a free, open-source, and cross-platform code editor developed by Microsoft. Ranked as the Most Popular Development Environment in the 2019 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Visual Studio Code is a feature-rich highly customizable code editor that not only is great for editing source code but has built-in support for collaboration and cloud-hosted environments. Visual Studio Code's source code is available in the product's GitHub repository at ...