Effective PyCharm Transcripts
Chapter: Why PyCharm and IDEs?
Lecture: Welcome to Mastering PyCharm
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Hello and welcome to Mastering PyCharm. In this course, we're going to look at all the different features of one of the very best Python IDEs— PyCharm,
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and see how you can make the most of this super powerful editor. Let's jump right into what we're going to cover.
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First thing we are going to talk about is why do we want to use an IDE, what value does some large,
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heavyweight application like PyCharm bring and why would we want to use it. You'll see there's many reasons and you'll definitely want to use
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many of the features that are there, but let's talk about the various types of editors we can use and what the trade-offs are there.
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When we're working with PyCharm, we're focused on this idea called projects, this is like a group of Python files and associated other
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static and data files that all work together, there's many of the features in PyCharm that work at this level. We're going to start by focusing on
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creating new projects and working with all the files and you'll see there's a bunch of configuration switches
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we can set to make it be a little more effective. Then we're going to jump right into what I would say is the star of the show— the editor.
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If you're writing code you need an editor, you want to be typing and manipulating text, of course, the editor has to be awesome,
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we're going to focus on all the cool features that the PyCharm editor offers. We'll see that source control in particular, git and subversion
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are really deeply integrated into PyCharm, there's all sorts of powerful things we can do including actual github integration,
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not just git but github integration into github issues and things like that. We were going to focus on source control
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and the features right inside the IDE that we can use for git and github and things like that. We're going to see that PyCharm is great at refactoring
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this is changing our code to restructure it to maybe be structured in a different way, to use a slightly different algorithm,
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but not actually changing the behavior of the code; we'll see there are many powerful techniques in PyCharm that you can use to do this
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and because it understands all of your files at once, it can safely do this, it will even do this out in doc strings and things like that,
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so we'll see how the tools that are working that's really quite amazing. There is some really interesting database tooling
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and database integration in PyCharm, so you'll be able to interact with databases, SQLite, MySQL, whatever, you can connect
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all the different types of databases, these relational databases and edit the data, edit the schemes and things like that,
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and you'll even see that there's one really amazing feature that makes its way back into the editor
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when you're working with SQL strings in your Python code. PyCharm is great at building web applications,
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typically, this would be something like Django or Pyramid, or Flask or something like that, but it also builds other types of web things,
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it has a full Javascript editor and environment in there, it could do TypeScript or CoffeeScript,
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it could even do things like Electron js, so lots of really cool stuff in here. Then we'll talk about all the both
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server side and client side features, on the web in PyCharm. You will see that it has a great visual debugger
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so we are going to look at all the different features that we can use to debug and understand our application
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including some really powerful breakpoint operations that typically editors don't have. In Python, we use the concept of packaging
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to bundle up and share and reuse our libraries, we'll see that PyCharm has a ton of features to make and understand these packages,
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so it understands the file structure of packages, how to do automatic imports, they also do things like automatically generate you a setup.py
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so people can install and configure your package and not just copy the files over; so all sorts of good stuff there, we'll talk about that.
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Profiling is really important if you want to understand how your code is running, if your application is slow and you want it to go faster,
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you really shouldn't guess, you'll see that it's easy to look at code and think that this is the slow part and that's the fast part
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but sometimes that's just not the case, and our intuition is often bad and so we use tooling, profiling in particular, to understand the performance,
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you will see that PyCharm has some really great built-in visual types of tools for us to basically understand the performance of our app.
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It has great built-in test runners for pytest, for the built-in unit test and a number of others that we're going to see,
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so if you are doing any sort of unit testing or integration testing, that's built in and we'll explore some of the really cool features,
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like for example, there is one feature you can turn on for auto test running and so if it knows that you are changing certain parts of your code
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it will automatically re-run the test, just as you type in the background and tell you basically, on the side continuously,
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"Your code is good" or, "Your code is bad." We'll see how to do that and a bunch of other cool stuff in the testing realm.
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They've integrated Jupyter notebooks and a special data science view
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with really cool documentation and all sorts of stuff to help you explore your data, we're going to talk about the data science tools
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and how those appear in PyCharm. There is a couple of additional tools that don't really land
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in any of these other categories that I have defined here, so I just made a "Here is the stuff that didn't fit in any of the boxes I created"
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I threw this at the end, additional tools, so there's a few other really cool, handy things that don't really
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classify themselves as fitting in with the others, so we'll talk about those. Last but not least, there's hundreds of plugins
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that you can get for PyCharm to make it do other things, like for example do you want it to have like Vim key bindings—
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great, go get the Vim plugin and plug it in and you've got Vim bindings for your editor, things like that.