From the course: Python Quick Start

Setting up your Python environment - Python Tutorial

From the course: Python Quick Start

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Setting up your Python environment

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So you might be wondering where do you write code and actually see the magic happen? Well, you do this in an environment that's built for coding. Now, there are various platforms out there, and each one provides a unique coding environment. And the more you talk to programmers, the more you'll hear strong feelings towards one platform or another. What's important to understand here is that all platforms will allow you to code and apply the skills you're learning in this course. And the platform I'm using is called Jupyter Notebook, which is available at Jupyter.org. This is a powerful platform and you'll see me use it throughout this course. Before you can get your hands dirty, you will need to set up your environment. I'll be showing you each step of the process. So I'm on the Anaconda distribution website and I'm going to scroll down to see the latest version that's available for me to download. So now, I'm going to double click to open up the installer. Great. We're all installed here, so let's go ahead and click "Continue." Now you want to open terminal, and now you want to type in Jupyter Notebook, make sure everything is lowercase and that there's a space between the two words and you want to hit "Enter." All right there on the home page of your Jupiter and you're ready to get going. The first thing you want to do is click on "New." This is on the upper right area of your screen. And you want to click on "Python 3." This is how we create a new notebook with Python 3. And Python 3 is the latest version of Python at this point. So one of the first things you want to do is to name your notebook. And you do this by clicking on untitled and typing in a new notebook name. I'm going to type in "Practice." Once you type that in, you can click "Rename." And there you go, you've renamed your notebook. Now, there are a lot of buttons and menu options here, but all you need to worry about right now is this box right here. This box is called a cell, and you can type code into a cell and then run it. So I'm going to go ahead and type in a line of code and I'm going to type print, "hello world" And there are two ways to run a cell. You can either click "Run" at the top here or if you're on a MAC, you can hit "Shift-Enter." I'm going to hit "Shift-Enter." And there we go. hello world is printed out. So if you're following along, now that you have Jupyter set up, your Python environment is ready for you. You're all set to dive into coding.

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