Python 3 Programming Introduction Tutorial

What you will need for this tutorial series: Either ActivePython, which is a pre-compiled distribution of Python, which comes with most of the packages you will need right away, or vanilla Python 3+, downloaded from Python.org A willingness to learn!

Chances are, if you're viewing this page, you're brand new to Python.

You might even be new to Programming all-together. Either way, you have come to the right place, and chosen the right language!

Why Python?

Python is very beginner-friendly. The syntax (words and structure) is extremely simple to read and follow, most of which can be understood even if you do not know any programming. Let me show you:

Garage = "Ferrari", "Honda", "Porsche", "Toyota" for each_car in Garage: print(each_car) "print()" is a built-in Python function that will output some text to the console . When someone says to "print to the console," they are referring to where information from your program is ouput. This might be a command prompt (CMD.exe), the terminal for Mac/Linux users, or the interactive prompt in IDLE. You will see an example of "output to console" below.

Looking at the code about cars in the garage, can you guess what will happen? You probably have a general idea. For each_car in the garage, we're going to do something. What are we doing? We are printing each car.

Since "printing" outputs some text to the "console," you can probably figure out that the console will say something like "Ferrari, Honda, Porsche, Toyota."

Python is a fully-functional programming language that can do anything almost any other language can do, at comparable speeds.

Python is capable of threading and GPU processing just like any other language. Most of the data processing modules are actually just Python wrappers around C/C++ code.

"Modules" are pre-written Python code that you "import" in your Python program. Since there are many tasks that people commonly do, we have modules that people have written that do these tasks for you, and they usually do them in the cleanest and most efficient method possible. Sometimes you will see people refer to "DRY." This stands for Don't Repeat Yourself, which often also translates into "Don't Repeat Someone Else."

The phrase "wrapper" means that someone has placed, like a wrapper, Python code over another language. So, when you have a Python wrapper around C++ code, what someone has done is written some Python code that interacts with the C++ language. This allows you to make use of various aspects of the language being wrapped, in this case C++, without actually needing to know or understand that language.

Thus, Python can be used to make games, do data analysis, control robot and hardware, create GUIs , or even to create websites.

"GUI" stands for Graphical User Interface, and is used to describe a program that incorporates graphics to make the program more interactive for the user.

99% of the code that brings this very page to you is actually Python code!

If you're curious to see some examples of what you can do with Python code, browse around the topics in the Home Page .

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