From the course: Python Essential Libraries

Setting up the development environment - Python Tutorial

From the course: Python Essential Libraries

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Setting up the development environment

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- [Instructor] Before we begin, let's spend a few moments making sure that your development environment is properly set up for the course. So first you're going to need a text editor to work with Python code and it doesn't matter which editor you want to use. So if you have a favorite, you can use that one for this course. As I said earlier, I'm going to be using Visual Studio Code and if you decide to use VS Code as well make sure that you install the free Python extension from Microsoft via the extensions marketplace. So you can install VS Code from this URL code.visualstudio.com and once you've got it installed and running, head over to the Visual Studio marketplace, you can either do this here in the browser or within the app and then install the free Python extension. It includes a lot of great features for working with Python. Now you don't need to use VS Code, you can also just run your code directly from the terminal and we'll show an example of that in a little bit. If you are new to Visual Studio, you might want to check out the Visual Studio Code for Python course to learn how to use this editor for working with Python applications. You're also going to need to have a recent version of Python on your computer already preferably at least 3.7. Now if you need to install Python, you can do so from the python.org website. Let's go ahead and open up a terminal window and we're going to make sure that we've got python installed, so I'm going to write python--version. Now if you're running on a Mac or a Linux machine then you might need to use the Python three command instead of just typing Python by itself. It depends on the installation that you've got on your machine. So I'm going ahead and run this command and you can see that when I run it, I'm running Python 3.8. And again to be able to complete this course because of some of the features we're going to be looking at, you should have at least 3.7 installed on your machine. So if this command gives you an error, then that means you don't have Python correctly installed and you should go to the Python website to get it onto your computer. You should also place the exercise files for this course somewhere on your computer where they are easy to access. Now I've put mine here on the desktop but that's not required, you can put them anywhere you want to. And if we take a quick look inside that folder, what you'll see is that I've organized each one of the libraries that we're going to be taking a look at into their own folder and if we go ahead and look inside one of these folders, you can see that I've provided finished and start versions of each of the exercises for you to use within the course. All right so that's pretty much all there is to it. Once you've selected a text editor, and you've made sure that Python at least 3.7 is installed, and you've got the exercise files where you want them, then you are ready to go.

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