Python - First steps

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Why should you choose Python?

Python is a modern program language and it's easy to learn. You can use it in a variety of solutions like data science, machine learning, web development, GUI development, iot, and others. There's a strong Python community that supports this language.

How to install Python?

Python is already available by default for the most of Linux and UNIX distributions. If you're using windows OS, it's possible to use Windows Subsystem for Linux aka WSL to use your favorite linux distribution in your machine. It's really easy to do this. Read the Microsoft official documentation to know how to install it.

If you prefer to install pyhton, you can see further informations here.

You can run this command to confirm that Python is installed

For UNIX or Linux distros

python3 --version

For Windows

py --version

Start using Python

You should to consider the command python3 for UNIX or Linux distros and py for Windows

You can use the command line to execute Python like this.

python3

And then, you can start coding like that

2 + 5

Using an IDE

I really suggest you to use a modern IDE for coding. For this example I'll use Visual Studio Code aka VSCode, but you can choose another one. Python website has a page to show you some recommended IDEs to use.

When VSCode is installed, you can click on Extensions icon and type Python on search bar. Then you can click install under Python extension developped by Microsoft.

Now you able to write your first code. For that you can create a new file called hello.py. Insert the a code inside this file.

print ('Hello world!')

and run it to see the result on the terminal.

Notes

• You can access this code on github.
• py extension is either called a python program or python script.

Typos or suggestions?

If you've found a typo, a sentence that could be improved or anything else that should be updated on this blog post, you can access it through a git repository and make a pull request. If you feel comfortable with github, instead of posting a comment, please go directly to https://github.com/campelo/documentation and open a new pull request with your changes.