Introduction to and setup of Python
Why to learn Python
Python is a great language to start programming with for several reasons
- It's free
- It's fun to learn
- It is used by many companies and even companies that don't write in Python want programmers that know Python because that shows that they are there because they like programming, not the income programming can provide.
Goto Python.org to find out more about what you can get for free, but you can get a lot. It also has links to books that you can pay for, But I'm hopeing that I can provide enough information that you won't need to buy a book.
Python teaches using fun things like how to make an omelet instead of how to combine 'foo' and 'bar'. If you've ever learned another language you know what I am talking about.
Peter Norvig, Google says this about Python "Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning, and remains so as the system grows and evolves. " Nasa also uses Python and so do a growing number of other businesses.
How to get the correct IDLE for you
Downloading Python
Before you start, you need Python on your computer, but you may not need to download it. First of all check (by entering python in a command line window) that you don't already have Python installed! If you see a response from a Python interpreter it will include a version number in its inital display. Generally any recent version will do, as Python makes every attempt to maintain backwards compatibility.
If you need to install, you may as well download the most recent stable version. This is the one with the highest number that isn't marked as an alpha or beta release. Currently the stable version is [WWW] Python 2.5.
If you're running Windows: the most stable Windows download is [WWW] Python 2.5 for Windows.
If you're running Windows XP: a complete guide to installing ActivePython is at [WWW] Python on XP: 7 Minutes To "Hello World!". ShowMeDo has [WWW] three videos for downloading, installing and testing Python (v2.4.2) on a Windows XP machine, though the 'downloading' video refers to an earlier version of the python.org website.
If you are using a Mac, see [WWW] this page. MacOS 10.2 (Jaguar), 10.3 (Panther) and 10.4 (Tiger) come with Python already, but you will probably want to install the [WWW] latest universal build.
For Red Hat, install the python2 and python2-devel packages.
For Debian, install the python2.5 and python2.5-dev packages.