Welcome to introduction to Python Scripting. This is the 1st course in the Python Scripting for DevOps Specialization. This specialization is going to give you a solid foundation in Python Scripting. So you'll learn how to do procedural programming, some object oriented programming. And then we're going to dive into some libraries. We'll look at how we can access databases. We'll look at how we can use some native arrays and some plotting and data analysis libraries. And then we're going to conclude in the last course by continuing on and looking at some package management in Python along with some additional libraries and some testing engines and browser automation kind of things you do in development operations. Okay? In this first course, we're really going to try to get your foundation in Python Scripting. So let's have some fun. All right. So in this first module, we want to think about in putting an output that comes from the console. And what I mean by that, as we want to be able to gather input from the keyboard and we want to output to a command line interface. Okay? And so we're actually going to roll up our sleeves and start coding early in this course. So by the end of this first module, I want you to have mastered several things. This includes being able to write programs that can read user input from the keyboard. I also want you to be able to develop programs that output information to the console. I want you to be able to compile and run programs in Visual Studio Code. That's how we'll do it in the labs in this course in your Web browser. But also one should be able to load IDLE. That's the Integrated Development Environment for Python that comes out of the box on your own machine if you want to. That's not a requirement, but something I'd like you to think about doing because it'll give you more power down the road as a programmer. All right, so let's start off thinking about getting and using python. Alright. So first off, what is Python? So Python is a programming language that lets you work quickly, and it also allows you to integrate systems more effectively. So for this course, we will be using an integrated development environment, and IDE. That's actually in your Web browser and this is called VSCode are visual studio code. You can also download python from python.org, and it will include IDLE as the default IDE. Both Visual Studio Code and IDLE includes several things. Syntax Highlighting, which means it's going to change the color of keywords so you can quickly see problems in your code as you're typing. It does code completion. So if you don't remember some of the syntax, it will help you figure out that syntax, as you're going, they included the bugger so you can step to your code line by line. And so the debunkers can allow us to execute code with a single button, step through the code line by line and interrogate variables as we're writing. So in the middle of the execution of a program, we can see what different variable values are. And if that doesn't make sense yet, don't worry, it will. All right. So we want to think about how is Python different And what I mean by different is, I mean, different from other programming languages. So Python is designed to get you programming faster. You do not need to declare variables. It has what's called dynamic typing. A lot of programming languages have something called static typing the differences in static typing. You have to tell the compiler this variable is going to hold a specific data type. In Python it uses dynamic typing where it figures it out for you. Python is often considered scripting, right? We're going to use it to solve problems quickly versus programming, and you tend to do with a larger team of programmers in a software development environment. I want to iron out some issues that come up often because Python has been around for a while and it's prevalent in a lot of operating systems by default. But sometimes it's an older version. So there are two major versions. Python 2 versus 3. So Python 3 is the latest major version of Python, and it's been released for over 10 years. So you should be using Python 3 In this course. Python 2 is still embedded in some operating systems as a scripting tool. It's easy to convert between the two there's some small differences. For example, in python 2 print is a statement. In Python three print is a function. So function requires parentheses, and we'll talk more about that as we move forward in this course. All right, so next we want to think about how to get started coding. So Python is installed by default on most Unix based systems. So these are Lennox, and most of the modern versions of the distros include Python 3. In MacOS this includes Python 2, but you can install Python 3 with xCode windows. You can either download IDLE from python.org. Or you can download your own local copy of this code like we're going to use in the labs from code.visualstudio.com. All the programming assignments in this class are going to be done in the browser and VSCode. You can play around up in that environment. You can write any code you want. There's a submit button when you actually want to submit your programming assignments for this course. So there's no reason to install a local copy. But I think at some point you're going to want to. You're going to want to start being more in control of your programming environment, but you don't have to do that from the beginning. All right. So I want to differentiate a little bit here so you can use a text editor for programming with Python. You do not need to use an IDE and an IDE remembers an integrated development environment. And the two we talk a lot about this course, are Visual Studio Code and IDLE. But you can use any text editor If you want to write code from the command line. On Windows, there's lots of them. So Visual Studio Code is an IDE. But includes a text editor, Notepad, Notepad++ notepad2. On MacOS, there's text edit or Visual Studio Code. Linux, you can use Vim or Atom. Or there's a million different text editors on Linux. All right, that's it for less than one. I want to do a little review here. So Visual Studio Code is a free Integrated Development Environment from Microsoft. An IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment includes all those things we talked about. The ability to step through your code to edit your code to bug your code, those sorts of things. And a text editor stores your human readable code without any special characters. So what I mean by that is if you use Microsoft Word and you try to write code, it would be all this garbage so that it wouldn't work. Because words stores things about the layout of the user interface essentially, if your document where text editor stores it in raw format. All right, see in the next lesson.
