I'm working on learning Python as part of learning about Data Science, so in the process of doing that, I thought I'd put together a series of Python tutorial blog posts. Python is supposed to be easy to learn, so we'll see.
In order to use Python on your local machine, it needs to be downloaded from here. There are 2 major versions available. The latest is 3.7.1. There is also a version 2.7.15. I'm going to focus on version 3, which is the result of cleaning up version 2 without regards to backwards compatibility. Version 2 will not have any new major releases, but it's still in use by a lot of people. In fact, an online course I tried taking still used version 2. It is possible to install version 2 and version 3 on the same computer though. The trick to getting them both to work from the command line is to rename the executable of one version a different name than the other version. For example, I renamed python.exe for version 2 python2.exe. In a Windows command prompt, I can run version 3 by typing python. I can also run version 2 by typing python2 in the command prompt. Both versions need to have their directories added to the environment variable PATH setting.
For version 3, add the following to the environment variable PATH setting:
C:\your path to python3\Scripts\
C:\your path to python3\
For version 2, add the following to the environment variable PATH setting:
C:\your path to python2
To code in python, Anaconda is a popular data science tool which comes packaged with Python. There are also online Python editors, such as https://www.onlinegdb.com or https://repl.it/repls/SoftRashSearchengine.
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