Python for Absolute Beginners Transcripts
Chapter: Course setup and requirements
Lecture: Installing and updating Python
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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?
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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.
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On macOS or even on Linux, you can type Python3 -V, all one word Lowercase v means something entirely different. Python3 -V
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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.
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Over on Windows, you type Python, not necessarily Python3. There's different ways you can install Python on Windows.
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Sometimes it comes with the Python3 command sometimes it doesn't. So type, Python -V like before, and it will tell you the version.
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Let's just play around with that really quick over here on my computer. Now, something you're going to get familiar with
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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
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down here in your dock like it is on mine and many developers'. You can hit Command + Space and type terminal, on macOS.
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We're going to talk about Windows in just a minute. Or you could type this where you go applications, utilities, terminal.
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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.
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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.
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So, we're going to see do we have Python 3. If we just type Python3 it does something that we don't want.
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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.
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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
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because it's 3.6 or higher that we need. You know I also wonder where is this thing installed.
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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
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I have multiple ones installed which one is it actually finding something like that. So this is how you check whether you have Python
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on macOS and Linux. Looks like I do.