Visual Studio Code for Python Developers Transcripts
Chapter: Course Overview
Lecture: What You'll Need
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Welcome into this next video. We're going to be talking about what you will need in order to be able to follow along with this course.
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First up, obviously, you're going to need the most important thing. What is that, Cecil? A computer. Yeah.
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One of the first things that you're going to need for this course, and we should have installed or we're going to talk about how you can get it installed, is Python.
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We are going to talk about Python and VS Code, so hopefully you have Python installed already.
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If not, we have some other videos later on in the course that are going to talk about how you can get it installed.
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But for those of you that are pretty new or fresh, Python is a programming language, and it allows us to do a lot of cool things like build desktop applications and microservices and web apps and web APIs and tons of cool stuff.
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So, again, we're not going to dive into how to use Python or the syntax and the semantics.
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But we are going to talk about how you can be productive using Python inside of VS Code.
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And speaking about VS Code, I'm guessing we're going to need to install that too, right? Yes.
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So you will need to get this in the getting started module.
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You'll be able to go into detail on all of this, but I at least want to give you a high level overview of what Visual Studio Code is. It is an editor.
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It is not necessarily an IDE, but through its plugins and extensions, you will be able to kind of view it as on a spectrum of like whether it's an IDE or an IDE.
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It is not necessarily an IDE, but through its plugins and extensions, you will be able to kind of view it as on a spectrum of like whether it's an IDE or an IDE.
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but through its plugins and extensions, you will be able to kind of view it as on a spectrum of
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like whether it's an edit, more of an editor or an interactive or integrated development environment.
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That is, because of the rich development experience you'll get with a lot of the plugins
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that are available to you in the VS Code marketplace. So VS Code is a piece of software.
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It's a desktop client, but also it could be used in the web, for VS Code.dev and it's built
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with web technologies. So things like JavaScript and Electron help make it possible to be used
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cross-platform as a thick client application, but then also in the web, in your browser,
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like I was mentioning before, it is open source. So if you went to github.com slash Microsoft
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slash VS Code, you can follow along. You can build it from source if you wanted to, even
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it's completely free and, you can, you know, keep up to speed with the latest releases and, and the development.
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Activity on it directly in this open source repository. So now that we know what you're
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going to need, like Python and VS Code, I mentioned editors and IDEs. What Cecil, what's
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the difference for folks that aren't familiar with that? What's the difference between the two?
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Yeah, I think that's an important thing for us to like take care of off the bat.
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And for folks that are in the Python space, if you've been around for a little while,
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you might even have heard of a couple like PyCharm as an example. And PyCharm is a really good,
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Python IDE, right? IDE standing for integrated development environment versus an editor. And
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now one of the things that you get from your IDE versus your editor is, well, you usually get a lot
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deeper support for introspection and debugging for, you know, a lot of analyzers, linters, all these
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different types of things. And they're usually already pre-packaged and bundled and ready for
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you to go. Right? Python itself, again, it's, it's very focused on Python. We talk about this Visual Studio Code, as you'll see as we go on,
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it's a very extensible editor. It's good for editing code, and you can add extensions to it. You can customize it, you can tweak it,
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you can set whatever settings you need to set, so you can do what you want to do. But it is not an IDE, right? So again, out of the box,
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you can expect to have things like templates or syntax highlighting for your templating languages
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and all these different types of things from your IDE. And you might have that in your editor too, but usually your editor has so much better support,
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even support for deployments, version control, all kinds of things, but with so much more additional features.
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Like what Brian mentioned a little while ago, VS Code is free. It's free, it's open source, and you could download it and compile it
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and tweak it yourself if you wanted to. Versus something like PyChart, well, you do have to pay some money for it. They do have licensing available
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for open source projects and students so that you don't have to pay or pay as much for it. But again, IDEs and editors are different, right?
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And they serve different purposes. So again, we're going to focus on the editor, right? Which is Visual Studio Code in this course.
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But PyChart is a really great choice if it has the features that you need it to, you know, to build your application with.
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Yeah, and really quick to close that out, there is this awesome blog post on LogRocket about PyCharm versus VS Code
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that goes more in depth if you want to know and understand that better on a deeper level. You can go ahead and check that out.
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We'll share the link in our resources, which leads me perfectly to segue into the next video where you're going to be able to find out
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what other resources we have available for you to use throughout the rest of the course to help you along the way. So tune into that next.