0: Gearing Up

This exercise has no code. It is simply the exercise you complete to get your computer to run Python. You should follow these instructions as exactly as possible. If you have problems following the written instructions, then watch the included videos for your platform.

General Instructions

Your general task is to get a "programming environment" with tools you can use to write code. Nearly every programmer has their own specialized environment, but at first you'll want something simple that can get you through this course. After the course you'll know enough about programming to then waste the rest of your life trying every tool you can imagine. It's a lot of fun.

What you'll need is the following, but don't install it yet. This is just a preview of what you'll install in a minute:

1. Jupyter which will be used in the first part of the book to get you started easily. Jupyter is a programming and data analysis environment that uses many languages, but we'll use Python.
2. Python. The version of Python you install mostly doesn’t matter so long as it’s newer than version 3.10. Versions of Python (and other software) use numbers to indicate their age, and the position of the numbers determines how much changed between versions. The general rule is the first number means “major change,” the second number means “compatible changes,” and a third number means only bug or security fixes. That means if you have version 3.8 and version 3.10, then they should be compatible. If you have versions 3.10.1 and 3.10.2, then there are only minor fixes.
3. A basic programmer's editor. Programmers use very complicated text editors, but you should start with something simple that still works as a programmer's editor.
4. A Terminal emulator. This is a text based command interface to your computer. If you've ever seen a movie with hacking and programming in it you've seen people furiously typing green text into a black screen so they can take down an entire alien race with their "unix exe 32 pipe attack". At first you won't need this but later you'll "graduate" to using the Terminal as it's incredibly powerful and not too hard to learn.

You should have most of the other things you'll need on your computer already, so let's install each of these requirements for your Operating System (OS).