Hello everyone, in todays blog I will be kicking off our first entry to the python section and I am just going to be going over how to set up Python. I know I know, that absolutely crazy for an introductory blog. All joking aside, let’s go ahead and get into it. Thank you all for coming and reading my blog and I hope that it is informative and helpful.
To go ahead and get started with the installation you are going to want to go to https://www.python.org. Once you are on this page you are going to want to hover over the downloads dropdown and the website will automatically recognize the OS that you are using so for me it would look like this.
When you click on the button it will automatically download python. You are going to want to open the installation wizard and walk all the way through that. Afterward, you are going to want to go ahead and open your command prompt. Go ahead and type “python” and press enter. If you installed it successfully you should see something like this.
There are plenty of different options for how you can use Python, you could just use the command prompt, you could use web applications, you could install applications but I use Visual Studio Code so that’s what I am going to show.
Once you are inside of Visual Studio Code you are going to want to click on the extensions button on the right side of your screen.
From here the extensions pane will open up on the side of the screen that looks like this.
Then you are going to want to type “python” into the search bar and click on the first option. This will pull up the information that Visual Studio Code has on Python. You are going to want to now click install. I already have it installed so it’ll look a little different from what you will have but it should show up in the same spot.
Next thing you are going to want to do is close that tab and get back to the main screen of visual studio code. Once here you’ll need to right click and select “New text file”.
This will open up a new script for you to write in and to use python all you have to do is click on “Select a language” and type python or scroll to it and click on it.
And now you have seen how to set up python. It isn’t a long process thankfully and I personally love how easy it is to use Visual Studio Code especially with it’s IntelliSense (I promise I am not sponsored by Microsoft). Anyways, I hope that this blog was helpful to anyone trying to start out with Python. I will have more blogs on the subject coming out so stay tuned for more. Thank you for reading and have a great rest of your day.
Bailey McDonald
Data Engineer, Patriot Consulting
Email: bkmcdonald@patriotconsultingcorp.com | Blogs: Patriot Consulting Blogs
LinkedIn: Personal: BaileyMcDonald | Company: Patriot Consulting
