I’ve decided to document the process I’m undertaking to learning Python. It won’t be pretty all the time, and it might not make sense to others either. I’m going to try to occasionally make new posts and use my website as a “code diary” of sorts. Hopefully, it will assist others looking to learn the language as well.

Udemy, For Some Reason

I started off by purchasing The Ultimate Python Programming Tutorial by Infinite Skills on udemy.com. It seemed like a good resource to get me pointed in the direction, but I would not say the course was very well focused. It began by introducing extremely simple general programming topics, then jumped to intermediate topics very quickly. In all, this resource was more of a introducing to programming than it was an introduction to this specific language. I would not recommend this course for someone that already has somewhat of a programming background.

I did learn how to get it running quite simply, though. The most current version is available at python.org as a regular Windows installer. There are currently two actively supported versions – 2.7.5 and 3.3.2. From what I understand, there are quite a few very popular packages that don’t support version 3.0 onward, so many people actually use both in tandem.

After running the installation, the compiled code installs in a folder like C:\Python27 (or, D:\Python27 in my case). Loading the shell (I’m not positive that’s the right word for it) is as simple as opening up a command window, navigating to the installation folder, and typing the python command. The command line changes to two chevrons, while the version of the code and whether it is 32 or 64-bit is displayed as well.