In this article by Bhaskar Das and Mohit Raj, authors of the book, Learn Python in 7 days, we will learn basics of Python. The Python language had a humble beginning in the late 1980s when a Dutchman, Guido Von Rossum, started working on a fun project that would be a successor to the ABC language with better exception handling and capability to interface with OS Amoeba at Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica. It first appeared in 1991. Python 2.0 was released in the year 2000 and Python 3.0 was released in the year 2008. The language was named Python after the famous British television comedy show Monty Python's Flying Circus, which was one of the favorite television programmes of Guido. Here, we will see why Python has suddenly influenced our lives, various applications that use Python, and Python's implementations. In this article, you will be learning the basic installation steps required to perform on different platforms (that is Windows, Linux and Mac), about environment variables, setting up environment variables, file formats, Python interactive shell, basic syntaxes, and, finally, printing out the formatted output.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Why Python?

Now you might be suddenly bogged with the question, why Python? According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2016 ranking, Python ranked third after C and Java. As per Indeed.com's data of 2016, Python job market search ranked fifth. Clearly, all the data points to the ever-rising demand in the job market for Python. It's a cool language if you want to learn it just for fun. Also, you will adore the language if you want to build your career around Python. At the school level, many schools have started including Python programming for kids. With new technologies taking the market by surprise, Python has been playing a dominant role. Whether it's cloud platform, mobile app development, BigData, IoT with Raspberry Pi, or the new Blockchain technology, Python is being seen as a niche language platform to develop and deliver scalable and robust applications.

Some key features of the language are:

Python programs can run on any platform, you can carry code created in a Windows machine and run it on Mac or Linux
Python has a large inbuilt library with prebuilt and portable functionality, known as the standard library
Python is an expressive language
Python is free and open source
Python code is about one third of the size of equivalent C++ and Java code.
Python can be both dynamically and strongly typed
In dynamically typed, the type of a variable is interpreted at runtime, which means that there is no need to define the type (int, float) of a variable in Python

Python applications

One of the most famous platform where Python is extensively used is YouTube. Other places where you will find Python being extensively used are special effects in Hollywood movies, drug evolution and discovery, traffic control systems, ERP systems, cloud hosting, e-commerce platform, CRM systems, and whichever field you can think of.

Versions

At the time of writing this book, the two main versions of the Python programming language available in the market were Python 2.x and Python 3.x. The stable releases at the time of writing this book were Python 2.7.13 and Python 3.6.0.

Implementations of Python

Major implementations include CPython, Jython, IronPython, MicroPython and PyPy.

Installation

Here, we will look forward to the installation of Python on three different OS platforms, namely Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. Let's begin with the Windows platform.

Installation on Windows platform

Python 2.x can be downloaded from https://www.python.org/downloads. The installer is simple and easy to install. Follow these steps to install the setup:

Once you click on the setup installer, you will get a small window on your desktop screen as shown. Click onNext:
Provide a suitable installation folder to install Python. If you don't provide the installation folder, then the installer will automatically create an installation folder for you as shown in the screenshot shown. Click on Next:
After the completion of Step 2, you will get a window to customize Python as shown in the following screenshot. Note that theAdd python.exe to Path option has been markedx. Select this option to add it to system path variable. Click onNext:
Finally, clickFinish to complete the installation:

Summary

So far, we did a walk through on the beginning and brief history of Python. We looked at the various implementations and flavors of Python. You also learned about installing on Windows OS. Hope this article has incited enough interest in Python and serves as your first step in the kingdom of Python, with enormous possibilities!