A short tutorial on setting up a PC/Mac/Linux machine to program in python.
0. Prerequisites
0.0 Python 2.7
Windows :
Go to
https://www.python.org/download
and click on the link that looks like
Python 2.7 Windows Installer (Windows binary – does not include source)
When the download completes install python by following the instructions on the screen.
Now open a terminal and type
set path=%path%;C:\python27If you are using Mac
or Linux then you need not download anything as python comes preinstalled.
0.1 A Code Editor (optional)
A python program, or any program for that matter is just a text file that can be edited directly using any text editor. However, it is strongly recommended that you use a proper code editor since python uses whitespace (tabs and spaces, that is) to determine which block does a statement belong to.
Recommended Editors :
Notepad++ (Windows) http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
JEdit (Any OS) www.jedit.org/
Pico (Linux/Unix)
Vim (Linux/Unix)/gVim(Windows) – For advanced users
Emacs (Any OS) www.gnu.org/software/emacs/
Do not use Notepad or Wordpad to write code.
1. A Tutorial Introduction
Now that you have python, go ahead and open up a terminal, type “python” (without quotes) and hit enter.
You should have a window that looks like this
This is the Python Interpreter. The text on the top tells the version of python that you are using , the ‘»>’ is the prompt – it means python is ready and is waiting for you command !
Type
print 'Hello, World!'You’ll see Hello, World on the next line of the terminal.
Congratulations ! You just wrote your first program in python !
The command print takes a string(that is anything enclosed between quotes) and displays it on the terminal.
The python Interpreter can do a variety of things – mathematical calulations, string manipulations, list creation and a lot more.
2. What next ?
You might want to check out the following links
http://www.codecademy.com/en/tracks/python
and work on the basics of python.
We’ll start with real-life applications in the next post.