3. Getting started with Python

Today, Python is the programming language of choice: it is open-source, intuitive, understandable as plain English, beginner-friendly, and very popular. Python is currently the most used language among developers and data scientists, which means that there is a lot of documentation and troubleshooting support online. Moreover, there is a huge amount of code that other people have written in Python and that you can reuse, as it’s an open language. This encompasses both the publicly available pieces of code, as well as Python’s packages/libraries (which we discuss in more details later in this book).

Fig. 3.1 Python logo.

Using Python, you can ask your computer to do specific things, like perform a calculation, draw a graph, load data from a file, interact with a user, and more.

In this chapter, you will get familiar with how Python works. Practically, we will install the required software on your laptop and explore how to use it.