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21:46 |
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1:45 |
Hello and welcome to my course Python for Absolute Beginners I'm super excited to have you here we are going to have so much fun going through all of the code that we're going to write learning how to be effective with Python and honestly, learning how much fun programming can be. If you're new to programming, don't worry you're actually in exactly the right place this course is for people who are new to programming. A lot of courses assume background knowledge or experience with some programming concepts Do you know what a variable is? Do you know what loops are? Do you know what source code is? Do you know what a compiler is? Do you know how to use it? And then they'll teach you the details of some language with this one, we're going to start right from the start that's what we mean by absolute beginners because we're beginning at the beginning. We're going to cover all the ideas that maybe people who took computer science in college or have computer science degrees spent years studying, we're going to condense that down to just the essential things that you need to learn to have a core understanding of programming in general and we're going to work on Python and some of its most important features and teach you how to program simple applications with Python but don't let the word simple discourage you. By the time you're done with this course you're going to be able to write meaningful programs that you can use to automate things in your life. Are you a scientist and want to automate studying and processing the data you collect? You'll be able to do that, no problem. Need to create a simple little application to help you out with some other project you got going on? Yes, you can do that, or do you want to use this as a springboard to get into the deeper programming concepts like web development, databases? Yeah, it'll be great for that as well. So again, welcome to the course I'm so happy to have you here, let's get started.
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2:51 |
Let's start off with a question. Should you be a programmer? Sure, there's a bunch of people out there who love programming but it's probably not for everybody. Or is it? Well, let's look at it from a job perspective really quickly. In 2020, it's estimated that there'll be one million computer-related jobs that go unfilled. And often when you hear about policymakers talk about things like this, they say well what we need to do is train up a whole bunch of more computer scientists and send them out into the world so they can program all the things that need programming. I think this actually misses the point of what programming can be and also makes it a much more narrow area of study. It's not just about making a bunch of little programmers that can go out into the world and program the things and take all the jobs that we need to be filled. No. Programming is a superpower. And it's applicable for many, many more people than they initially realize. Here we have a little superhero who has some Python powers. Notice that she has a Python bag from the Python conference she's carrying around. What do I mean by programming is a superpower? If you are a biologist, and you collect a bunch of data and you have tens of thousands of entries you got to go work with and it's more complicated than something like say, Excel could handle with. Well, what do you do? Hire a bunch of people to go through it? Hire some grad students? Or do you spend 10 minutes writing a little bit of Python code that within milliseconds can take all that data and generate the reports and give her the insights that she needs. Or if you're an economist, and you need to do some work with a bunch of financial data? Maybe you could make Excel do that maybe you could make some other software do it. But with just a little tiny bit of programming power you can automate whatever it is you're trying to study in the financial markets and you'll be so far ahead of anyone else that's trying to do that same thing who is not a programmer. So the perspective I want you to have throughout this course is that whatever you care about, are you in psychology? Are you in biology? Are you a physicist? Are you in philosophy? Yes, philosophers, it also applies as well. Whatever you're into, if you learn a little bit of programming skill, you can take those mundane things that are hard to do, are tedious or take a long time or even maybe have too much data to even consider processing, with a little bit of programming experience you'll get in this course, you'll be able to go and automate that stuff and really supercharge whatever it is that you care about. So, yeah, maybe the world needs more programmers but what it really needs is a bunch of people who have expertise in something, and then they have a little bit of programming experience to make them much much more effective. Python's a really great place to get that power because it's so easy to get started with compared to other languages and there are many many libraries that we'll kind of talk about throughout this course that are super useful. So, are you ready to be a superhero?
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3:37 |
Does it seem like Python is everywhere? Here's a cover story from TechRepublic. Python is eating the world how one developer side project became the hottest programming language on the planet. That guy you see in the background there his name is Guido van Rossum, and he created Python in 1990. And it grew and grew and became a pretty respectable language it was doing important work until around 2012 where something happened and it just took off. And really what the thing I think happened is Python started to be used much more broadly outside of the traditional web developer programming world. Data scientists started moving there and all the types of folks I mentioned before with the superpower stuff, they saw Python having the right mix of what they need to get their work done and there are just more and more libraries hundreds of thousands of them actually created to solve all these problems. So Python is just blowing up and becoming an extremely popular programming language. How much, well let's go over this place called Stack Overflow. If you're not a developer yet you might not be aware of what Stack Overflow is. If you've done any programming at all, though you've been there. Stack Overflow is a Q&A site for asking questions about very specific issues and questions and challenges you have with programming languages programming libraries, and so on. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of questions many millions of visitors it's absolutely the first place you're going to find on the internet if you search for a detail about some programming language. Over here, they have this cool thing called Stack Overflow trends. And it shows the popularity or number of questions of the given programming language for that month. You can go and you see this goes from 2009 to almost 2020, a little over 10 years of data. And I put into this graph all the interesting programming languages C#, Python, JavaScript, Java, etc, etc. Right, these are the mainstream programming languages that you might consider learning if you're like Hey, I want to get into programming but there's all these options, where should I start?" Well, this graph gives you a hint and a good place to start, doesn't it? You don't have to be a mathematician to see that there might be one trend here and it's a little different than the others. But let me highlight that for you. If you look at Python, the growth of it is just exploding and it's becoming the most popular programming language in the world also the most popular way to learn programming at universities in the first place and this is really important because along with this curve here other things follow. This means that there are tones of jobs in Python. It also means there are many, many libraries that you can use to solve your problems. For example, there are over 500 different libraries just to do genetics. You don't have to start from scratch you can just say, I'd like to do this thing with genetics and there's probably some library out there you can go grab. You find one of these languages that's down near the bottom it's very unlikely there are many, many different little libraries you're going to have to solve those problems from scratch yourself. Though having a popular language is really important for lots of things but mostly because the tools and the libraries that you want to use, they're going to be great and plentiful. Finally, if you want to read a little bit about it a data scientist over at Stack Overflow wrote a cool article called The Incredible Growth of Python. And this was already evident back in 2017 you follow that graph back a little bit and you see, the big statement was well, it's starting to be more popular than these other languages, and we're projecting out that it's going to be pretty amazing. And yet, their predictions are right this just keeps on going but if you want to dig into a little bit more this is quite an interesting article you can check out over there.
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2:12 |
You should have a pretty good sense of what the prerequisite expectations are what we expect you to know as a student. But let's just call them out really quickly here so you can be sure that you're in the right place. First of all, there is no programming experience required. Meaning, I'd say most programming courses out there expect that you have some programming experience and they just build on that right? You already know how to program in Python so we're going to build a website in it. Or you already know how to do this in JavaScript so we're going to build this interactive web thing with it. This course is not like that. We assume that you know nothing about programming we're going to take it nice and slow and make sure we set the right foundations for you so you can be successful with programming and with Python. Obviously if there's no programming experience you also don't need to know Python. So don't worry, if it's totally new to you it's an exciting place to be but you don't have to know anything about it. So, that's fine. You do need a desire to learn basic programming skills and of course we're going to learn those skills in Python but that would be translatable to other things. So are you looking to gain this superpower that I mentioned at the beginning? You should, because it will put you head and shoulders above all the other folks doing whatever it is that you care about. So hopefully, you're excited to learn programming we're going to start with the basics and get that in place throughout this course. However, you do need to be quote "good with computers" whatever the heck that means. I would say, basically, you need to be able to type not necessarily super fast but typing is how you speak to the computer, how you create these programs and if typing is a challenge then this course is going to be super frustrating, right? Programming in general is going to be very frustrating because all you do is type to the computer all day. You'll hear a lot of professional programmers speaking poorly of things like user interfaces and mice, and all they do is use the keyboard all the time. You can take that a little bit too far but certainly typing is important. Also, operating a computer just in the sense of configuring things and installing stuff and so on. You may have to set up Python or have to set up some other tools and editors and you just need to be able to work with a computer pretty decently. So, I expect most people out there have this but I just want to put it out there like really this is the expectation that we have is that you are quote "good with computers".
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4:53 |
What exactly are we going to cover in this course? Well we're going to start talkin about why Python and why programming? Well we actually just concluded that, didn't we? Programming is a super power and Python is a great programming language that's easy to learn. Put those together and you're off to a good start. Next we're going to talk about how to get help. Something that's really frustrating when you're getting started in programming is, things are not working. You have to type exact, precise stuff to the computer. It's not as hard as it sounds, but if it's not just right. Not even just the words that you write but the order and the steps and the data. If it comes unglued even just a little bit it's going to freak out and crash and not work. And refuse to carry on. That's frustrating when you're getting started because it's hard to know how to fix that. Hard to know how to get help. So there's a couple of options I have for you on how to get help, both self help and help through the course here. We also want to make sure that your computer is ready to take this course, so we're going to talk about setup. How do you get Python, the right version of Python installed? As well as what editors you can use to write code and edit code throughout this course? So we want to spend a little bit a time making sure everybody's setup and ready to take the course. And then we get into the programming concepts proper. We're going to talk about the big ideas of programming. And what I mean by this is these are the ideas that you would learn from your first year computer science class if you went and took programming in the university. But instead of spending a whole year in a class we're just going to spend a little bit a time and hit the high points. But it's important that you have the right foundation to know how programs execute, what source code is how it gets translated to executable stuff, and so on. Then we're going to start writing some code. Writing your first line a code well we're going to write more than one line a code. We're going to write a bunch a fun things but here we're going to start writing a little bit a code. Visualizing what that does to the computer, both graphically and just runnin it to see what it does. We'll get started there. Then we're going to make our code interactive. You can think of maybe different levels of complexity of writing code. One of 'em is, I need to do something so do x and then do y and then do z. Then you're done. That's a real simple type a program but many programs don't work that way, do they? If you open up your web browser, it interacts with you. You type some stuff into the address bar and it goes somewhere. Shows you some information. That you click something. It does somethin in response. Maybe it asks you a question and then it does one of two things, depending on what you answer. So making this interactive code, that either reads data and then makes a decision, or interacts with people and makes a decision. Or more likely does both. This is of course, where you need to be to write real software. And so we're going to start writing simple code. And then we're going to write this more interactive code with things like conditional statements and loops and so on. Once you have the core ideas of a programming language in place, it's tricky to figure out how do I attack a problem? You know I have this code I can write. It makes the computer do stuff. I have this problem. It seems extremely complicated. And I don't really know where to start. But obviously people can solve it with software, so there must be some path. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a bunch of tips and techniques on how to break down the problem, so that it's not nearly as hard as it seems. Ya know, a handful of techniques and we're going to do bunch of examples. We're going to write a lot of code and talk through them and sort of think through the problem. Here are a couple things we could do. I'm going to choose this way and here's why, and so on. We're also going to build a couple games during this course. Games are fun and they're interactive. And they can be nice and simple, but they also are pretty good stand ins for this making code interactive story, that I told you. Right so, we'll try to have fun and write a couple a games and that'll challenge the things that we can do. We're going to maybe have our game save stuff. So we want to work with files and different file formats that our program can save and then remember, across running our program from time to time. Things like leader boards and configurations files to let people extend the game without reprogramming it. Stuff like that. One of Python's really important powers is it has hundreds of thousands of external libraries that are extremely powerful. I give you a hint about the geneticist earlier who could do, ya know, just go grab one of these libraries and ask some questions of data without actually working on all the details to make that happen. So we're going to take a couple of external packages, apply them to some of the programs that we write and I'll show you where to go find many many more. How to work with these external packages or libraries and add some really cool features to the programs that we write. And that's it. This is what we're going to do. We're going to go dutifully through simple and then more complicated and more complicated code. And add on little bits of super important functionality that, I think will actually be a whole lot of fun for you to learn as we go.
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5:19 |
We're nowhere ready to start writing code yet. We maybe don't even have Python or Editor set up. I want to start right from the beginning talking about how do you get help. Because who knows what stage of this whole process of learning Python and going through this course you might run into troubles. So lets right up front talk about how you might get help either with a set up problem or with running some code. So you go run your program and instead of something beautiful happening you get this. I'm seeing lots of red little hyperlinks pointing at our files and at the bottom down here you see that there's this attribute error. These are called exceptions. And this is not good. This means that your program has crashed and it's not running any more. Notice how it says process finished with exit code 1. That might sound good. It's not good. Zero is what you want. If it's not zero, chances are it's bad. So here we can see a little bit of details about this error. We can see that the line of code that actually caused that problem text = text.lower() don't worry about what that means yet. But that's the line where it crashed. And then below it, there's a description of the error. There's an attribute error. NoneType object has no attribute lower. This is actually I think is the most common error that you're ever going to run into in Python. But there's many many of these. So you're faced with this. What do you do? Or you're faced with Python won't install. Or won't run your file or whatever. Doesn't matter what the details are. What do we do? Well, first of all, you take exactly that error text and you put it into Google. Maybe you've done this a bunch of times and you're totally comfortable with it but if you haven't tried this before it's ridiculously effective. If there's some kind of error number oh man, sometimes that would be you just put in some random number into Google and it will give you exactly the solution that you need. So yeah, just take that and put it straight into there. Sometimes you want to be a little careful if it has very specific information about like your file name or something. That can throw it off but generally put the error straight here. And that will probably take you to stack overflow which is the place I was talking about before. Here you can see somebody says Hey, I'm trying to predict this thing and I'm doing this but instead what I get is this attribute error. And it's not on the screen here but if you scroll down they say Well here's the cause of this and here's what's happening. And so the problem is you actually need to clean your data values because some of them they're not set and that's what's making it crash. It's not a super solution they gave but it's a pretty good one. It's hard to give the exact solution because it's such a general error. Anyway, first thing, Google it. The next thing is, if it's actually running we're going to have our editor. This is the editor we're going to use. If it's running, you can put it into a debugger and put a breakpoint. See this line 29 here? The main part of the screen where the little red dot is. You click in that little area where the little red dot is it will toggle what's called a breakpoint. And when you run your code it will stop there. And look at all the gray on the screen by the code. Now don't worry about what the code is. But notice how it says like HTML is this big bunch of HTML stuff. And Shoop is something and header is h1 Episode 220 machine learning in the cloud with Azure. Those are the current values of all the pieces of data and variables you're working with. Also, down here you can inspect what's happening and go step by step and down here you can even expand the values and interact with them and change them to see what effect that might have. So if you're unsure what's happening maybe you're working with the value that's what you exactly expected. You can put it in this debugger. We're going to do this later. Again, it doesn't have to make sense now. I just want to make sure you have this right at the beginning in case you get stuck. Another thing you can do. After you've try to figure it out yourself and can't get this. You can come over to the course repository on GitHub. In the setup chapter, I'll give you details on how to get to this for this particular course but also on your course page when you're logged in the website. It's just a big link right at the top. So, over here there's an issues section and maybe someone else has already had a problem that you've run into. So here you can see a problem that's closed that somebody came here and said Hey, I'm having this problem with SSL certificate and I'm trying to do this thing to talk over the web with my Python program. It looked like it worked in your video but then when I try it. I get this. And we have this little conversation and we figure out what the fix actually is. So maybe if you go here and you see Closed issues or even Open ones but probably Closed ones you can actually see what happened. Other students are running into and talking about that. If you don't see something, you can ask a question just like this Hey, this is happening. I not suer why. Could you help?" Okay, so that's an option. And then finally I have office hours where you can come and chat. We can do screen sharing we can look at your programs. See what's happening and so on. So on your course page, you're have this section that says, "Come to our next office hour." If this isn't here that means one's not currently scheduled. Maybe I'm away traveling or something like that. But one will appear again here. You can go to your account page and actually say Send me an email anytime a new office hour is scheduled. You can go ahead and do that as well if you want. But these are the four ways; Google it put it in the debugger if it's a programming run time thing check out the issues for the course repository page come to office hours. I hope you don't get stuck at all but if you do I hope you get unstuck quickly.
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1:09 |
Finally, before we wrap up this chapter I just want to introduce myself. My name is Michael Kennedy, hello! Here I am, this is what I look like. You can find me on Twitter, where I'm @MKennedy. Super excited to be putting this course together for you and happy you're in it. So just a little bit about me I run the Talk Python To Me podcast. This is a podcast that's been going for four or five years and I interview many of the influential folks in the Python industry, from the people who create Python to people who use it at places like Instagram as well as, say, astronomers who are using it to understand the stars. So I have a pretty good spectrum of what people are doing and what they're up to with Python and how it's important to them and I'll try to convey that to you. Also, I happen to run another podcast called Python Bytes. This is like the weekly news in the Python space so if you want to stay up on that, you can subscribe to this. Both of these give me a lot of different sources to draw from to share with you throughout this course. Maybe most relevant, though is that I'm the founder and one of the principal authors at Talk Python Training, where you're taking this course. So this is me, welcome to the course. I'm happy to be here with you, let's get rolling.
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13:54 |
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3:06 |
In this chapter, we're going to make sure that your computer is ready for you to take this course. We want to make sure that Python is set up you have some kind of editor that works well for the kind of code that we're going to write, and so on. Let's start with Python. You're going to need to have Python 3.6. There's many different versions of Python and each time a new one is released they add a few features to the language. That means code that is written for the most recent version of Python will not run on the older versions. There's certain language syntax features that the older ones say, I have no idea what this is. This doesn't work. This is not Python. Well, maybe it wasn't Python five years ago but it is now, so you need to have a modern one that understands what's going on. And for this course you have to have Python 3.6 or above. Higher is fine, but below that is not going to work. So you might wonder, Do I have Python? Did my computer already come with it? Has it already been installed? Did I install it a year ago and forget about it? Well, let's find out. On macOS or even on Linux, you can type Python3 -V, all one word Lowercase v means something entirely different. Python3 -V and it will report out the version that it has so Python 3.7.4. This is not the latest, but it is good enough because it's past 3.6. Over on Windows, you type Python, not necessarily Python3. There's different ways you can install Python on Windows. Sometimes it comes with the Python3 command sometimes it doesn't. So type, Python -V like before, and it will tell you the version. Let's just play around with that really quick over here on my computer. Now, something you're going to get familiar with is this thing called the terminal. Now, there's a couple ways you can get to it. If you're not a developer it's probably not hanging out down here in your dock like it is on mine and many developers'. You can hit Command + Space and type terminal, on macOS. We're going to talk about Windows in just a minute. Or you could type this where you go applications, utilities, terminal. But whatever, however you get to it I would pin it to your dock down here. Again, we're going to talk about Windows in just a minute. What you see here for macOS or really anytime for macOS it's exactly the same for Linux if you happen to be on Linux. So, we're going to see do we have Python 3. If we just type Python3 it does something that we don't want. If we forget the three, well we get Python 2.7. This is definitely not going to run the code that we want. So, we don't want that. We want to do Python3 -V and it records out that we have 3.7.5. It's not the latest three that's out but plenty good so we're going to roll with it because it's 3.6 or higher that we need. You know I also wonder where is this thing installed. Where did it come from? So you can ask which Python3, and it will show you it's installed over here. Maybe that's useful if you're trying to track down I have multiple ones installed which one is it actually finding something like that. So this is how you check whether you have Python on macOS and Linux. Looks like I do.
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2:57 |
Let's see how to verify that we have Python and the right version of Python on Windows. We went to the terminal on macOS or on Linux and over here we're going to go to the Command Prompt. And again, if you don't have it here you can just type startcmd and it's going to run like that. This one has slightly different settings than that one. That's a good question, why? I honestly have no idea why. So here we are, you'll see some kind of prompt like this with your username and you can type things like Python -V. And over here, we have a newer version 3.8, how cool is that? We could also try a Python3. And look at this. What the heck just happened there? Why did we not see anything? Well, it turns out, in the latest version or many of the recent versions of Windows 10 they've installed these little shims that if you try to run Python and it's not there it will suggest that you install it off the Windows 10 Store. And that's a good way to get it. You should consider that for sure. But what's weird is, it doesn't say you don't have Python installed you should install it, or something when you do this. If I just type Python3 notice, it opens up the Windows Store, and that's cool and I can just click install. Oddly, this is 3.7 when 3.8 is out, but whatever. 3.7 is more than good enough you can install this and that would be great. If you type Python or Python3 -V, like this and you get no output, not like this, but like this that means is just maybe kind of going to show you the Windows Store if you don't give it any options. It should give you something here, even when you do this but it doesn't. So, it can be really tricky like I just didn't get anything, right? So, if you see something like this be sure to run it like that. Now, we have Python installed here. And we can actually ask where on macOS, which here we can ask where Python. And it'll show you over in Python 3.8 this is apparently first in the path. So that's the one that's going to run. But we also have 3.7. We also have the Windows app installed here. And this is just the shim, the thing I talked about that launches the Windows Store. But have the same question for Python 3 you can see it's over here and this other stuff you can ignore. This one is some setup on but it's not first in the path so the Windows Store one is going to run first and then it will replace itself with real Python if you choose to install it. Whew, does that seem a little bit complicated? A little bit, but it's not too bad. The thing is, you do this once, and you get it all set up and you're good to go. So, just make sure that you have a command you can type that's either Python or Python 3 and you give it the -V, you get 3.6 or above. If you want to install the Windows Store version that's totally fine. If you do, the benefit is that you also have a Python3 command, unless you saw the Windows Store version. Windows only has Python, not Python3. It just happens to be it looks through the path and grabs the first one, which hopefully is Python 3 rather than two. Okay, so make sure that you've got it set up so you can run this and get something along those lines on Windows, and then you'll be ready to take this course.
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0:42 |
If it turns out that you don't have Python 3 or that the version is too low and you need to install a new version of Python 3 don't worry, it's pretty easy. Folks over here at realPython.com have put together a nice guide for you. So just visit realPython.com/installing-Python. They let you identify your operating system. Are you using Windows or Mac or Linux or whatever it is that you're using and then they give you a couple of different options and recommendation for the best way to install Python on your computer. So you need to install Python instead of me giving you a whole bunch of variations and whatnot, this is a great article that gives you all that and a recommendation on what to do. Just go check it out and then come back to the course.
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4:40 |
In addition to Python you're going to need to be able to write code. Now, truthfully, any text editor will let you write code but it is very important that you have one that understands Python and understands programming concepts because you'll be many, many more times effective and it'll catch all the errors for you. You'll see what we mean throughout this course but I'm going to recommend a handful of editors that you could use, all of which are free and it's going to make you really much, much more comfortable and it'll catch the errors and help you out as you go. So we're going to have a couple of levels of editing code. We're going to start out just by playing with code in this thing called a REPL a Read Eval Print Loop, R-E-P-L. Now, we actually saw that before when I was just trying to check if I had Python. I typed Python3 without any extra stuff and I got something that looked kind of like this. This is an interactive way where you can explore little bits of Python code. You can see I said X is 10, Y is 98, Z is 24 and I multiplied them all together and got some kind of answer out. This is not how we write normal computer code. You can't save this. You can't easily get this back. So if you're going to write a real program you should save it to a file and then you feed that file to Python. But in the very early stages of this course when we're just playing with simple, simple ideas we're just going to open this up and see what's happening. Okay, so this is level one. We're going to do this just for like a chapter or so and then I'm going to move on to writing real programs. For that level, I'm going to be using something called PyCharm. You already saw a screen shot of that. Now, it says the Python IDE Integrated Development Environment for professional developers, and that is true. Many professional developers use PyCharm. It's extremely powerful and useful but it's also one of the most helpful editors for beginners as well. The reason is it gives you all this help. You're going, "I want to use this library," and you start to type it and it'll show you all the things you can do with it. It'll give you automatic help. It'll check for errors before you even run them and run into those problems, all kinds of great stuff. So we're going to be using PyCharm. There's a paid version, the Professional version and there's a free Community Edition. We are going to be using the Community Edition. If you have the Professional one, that's fine. It's no harm with that, but you don't need to get it. That one costs money. The free Community Edition, as you can imagine, is free so we're going to be using that one and it's totally capable for what we need for this course. The best way to get it is to install this thing called the JetBrains Toolbox. So you can go download it. I think you might have to log in. I'm not entirely sure if you got to create an account or not. But notice how it has PyCharm Professional in this list and then those are the installed ones. If you scroll down farther, it says, "Available." Just scroll down until you see PyCharm Community. Click that, and wait one minute and you'll have PyCharm. What's nice about this is it always keeps it up to date and it gives you access to the other tools as well that you might need. So it'll say, "Hey, there's an update for your PyCharm "You want to click here and get it?" Yes. I do. This is nice. Make sure you install it and get going. If, for some reason, you don't want to use PyCharm like I said, really nice, you'll see it super good. I think it's the best editor for beginners. If you don't want to use it for some reason the other good choice these days is something called Visual Studio Code. This is free. It is open source. It is available on all the different platforms even though it's from Microsoft. So you come over here. You can see it, and it's a little under and the important thing is once you install it you also need to make sure you install the Python extension. This thing has been downloaded 54 million times. It's the most popular thing on Visual Studio Code but if you don't install it it's not going to understand Python and it's not going to work right. Click this little box here. It opens up this dialogue and it should have Python right at the top. It seems like it's much more popular than all the others. So click that, wait a few moments and you'll have your Visual Studio Code ready to work on Python. Finally, there's one third option that you can consider. I would recommend, really, PyCharm and then Visual Studio Code and then this, but there's a lot of folks especially coming from the data science world that like to work in something called JupyterLab or Jupyter Notebooks and you're welcome to use this, as well as the way to work with the course. There's a few little situations where it won't quite work but for the most part, it'll be okay. I'm not going to recommend this or use this but I will, at the very end of the course put an appendix if you want to install this. It takes a few steps on configuring your system to make it work, and then you have this editor as well which is a interesting environment. So you can use this for most of what you're doing and check the appendix on how to get going with that.
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transcript
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2:29 |
Now before we get started with this course I want to make sure that you have all the code that you're going to see written on the screen by me. I'm going to make sure that everything that I write everything that I create is going to be saved and available for you, online, here on GitHub. So at this address github.com/talkPython/Python-for-absolute-beginners-course If you go here and you somehow download this I'll show you a couple of options in a second. If you download this, then you'll be able to have all the code that we've written. This is also where those issues are where I told you, you can potentially go find other people who've solved problems like yours and so on. So, before you go any farther make sure you go over to GitHub. If you don't have an account, create one; you're going to want to have a GitHub account. This is where all the software developers collaborate where you get all the libraries, all kinds of stuff. And then just click that little star where it says unstar That's because I've already starred it. Click that star and even maybe click fork so it goes over into your own space. But most importantly you need to clone or download it. So over here it says clone or download it gives you options to either use Git which I'll show you in a second, or just download a zip file and uncompress it. The advantage of having Git is if there's any updates it will get the new updates over time, whereas the download by zip is just a snapshot of what it was at that moment. Now before we move off this, let's really quickly get that code onto my machine. So we're going to go over here and in this folder I'm going to git clone, that stuff. So if you haven't used Git before you might need to install it. So, you can see if you have it if you type "G-I-T". Git. If you get something like this, yay, you have Git. You're probably good. If you get an error, like command "Git Not Found" then just google and install Git for your operating system. Install Git for macOS, install Git from Windows, whatever. So what we're going to do is say git clone now I've copied the URL from the GitHub repository s |
