Python Get Started

Welcome back learners to the new topic on the Python lecture series. In this tutorial, we will see how we can run a python program in different ways.

For this tutorial series, I am assuming that you have python3 installed on your computer, If not don't worry I will be using the online Python console or Jupyter notebook so that you can directly start writing python programs using any device.

Verify Python installation on your system

To check if you have python installed on your PC, open the terminal or command prompt(cmd) and type the following command,

python --version

If you find that you do not have python installed on your computer, then you can download it for free from the following website: https://www.python.org/

How to write python script and run it on your PC

Let's write the python program step by step and run it.

• Open any text editor
• Copy and paste the below code into your text editor

print("Hello World!")

• Save the file with the name helloworld.py (note that we save the python script with (.py) extension)
• Open the command prompt or terminal and navigate to the directory where you saved your file, and run:

python helloworld.py

Your output should be

Hello World!

Let's see the live demo here

Python Interactive Shell

Sometimes we need to test a short amount of code in python so the quickest and easiest way to do that without creating a file is using python interactive shell.

To do this on your system type python in our terminal and python shell will prompt.

root@kali:~# python
Python 3.6.3 |Anaconda custom (64-bit)| (default, Nov  3 2017, 19:19:16) 
[GCC 7.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 

Now here you can write any python code including our hello world program

root@kali:~# python
Python 3.6.3 |Anaconda custom (64-bit)| (default, Nov  3 2017, 19:19:16) 
[GCC 7.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> print("Hello world!")
Hello world!

Let's do it in online python shell  if you don't have python installed on your system yet, Try writing yourself in the console below

Congratulations, you have written and executed your first Python program.

Pro Tips

Here are some pro tips for you so that you never stop learning, There are various online python interpreter use can use to write your code without having python installed on your system,

Google Notebook - It is an online Jupyter Notebook, here you can run python code and as well as install external libraries.

• To setup Python3 Notebook
• Click on File and click on New Python3 Notebook

Repl.it - Online Python3 Interpreter for writing programs