We love to make references to the real world when we teach coding; we believe they help people to better retain the concepts. However, now is the time to be a bit more rigorous and see what coding is from a more technical perspective.

When we write code, we are instructing a computer about the things it has to do. Where does the action happen? In many places: the computer memory, hard drives, network cables, the CPU, and so on. It's a whole world, which most of the time is the representation of a subset of the real world.

If you write a piece of software that allows people to buy clothes online, you will have to represent real people, real clothes, real brands, sizes, and so on and so forth, within the boundaries of a program.

In order to do so, you will need to create and handle objects in the program being written. A person can be an object. A car is an object. A pair of trousers is an object. Luckily, Python understands objects very well.

Python is the marvelous creation of Guido Van Rossum, a Dutch computer scientist and mathematician who decided to gift the world with a project he was playing around with over Christmas 1989. The language appeared to the public somewhere around 1991, and since then has evolved to be one of the leading programming languages used worldwide today.

We started programming when we were both very young. Fabrizio started at the age of 7, on a Commodore VIC-20, which was later replaced by its bigger brother, the Commodore 64. The language it used was BASIC. Heinrich started when he learned Pascal in high school. Between us, we've programmed in Pascal, Assembly, C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Visual Basic, PHP, ASP, ASP .NET, C#, and plenty of others we can't even remember; only when we landed on Python did we finally have that feeling that you have when you find the right couch in the shop. When all of your body is yelling: Buy this one! This one is perfect!

It...

Before we get into the gory details, let's get a sense of why someone would want to use Python (we recommend you read the Python page on Wikipedia to get a more detailed introduction).

In our opinion, Python epitomizes the following qualities.

Portability

Python runs everywhere, and porting a program from Linux to Windows or Mac is usually just a matter of fixing paths and settings. Python is designed for portability and it takes care of specific operating system (OS) quirks behind interfaces that shield you from the pain of having to write code tailored to a specific platform.

Coherence

Python is extremely logical and coherent. You can see it was designed by a brilliant computer scientist. Most of the time you can just guess how a method is called if you don't know it.

You may not realize how important this is right now, especially if you aren't that experienced as a programmer, but this is a major feature. It means less cluttering...

Probably, the only drawback that one could find in Python, which is not due to personal preferences, is its execution speed. Typically, Python is slower than its compiled siblings. The standard implementation of Python produces, when you run an application, a compiled version of the source code called byte code (with the extension .pyc), which is then run by the Python interpreter. The advantage of this approach is portability, which we pay for with increased runtimes due to the fact that Python is not compiled down to the machine level, as other languages are.

Despite this, Python speed is rarely a problem today, hence its wide use regardless of this aspect. What happens is that, in real life, hardware cost is no longer a problem, and usually it's easy enough to gain speed by parallelizing tasks. Moreover, many programs spend a great proportion of the time waiting for I/O operations to complete; therefore, the raw execution speed is often a secondary...

Still not convinced? Let's take a very brief look at the companies using Python today: Google, YouTube, Dropbox, Zope Corporation, Industrial Light & Magic, Walt Disney Feature Animation, Blender 3D, Pixar, NASA, the NSA, Red Hat, Nokia, IBM, Netflix, Yelp, Intel, Cisco, HP, Qualcomm, JPMorgan Chase, and Spotify—to name just a few. Even games such as Battlefield 2, Civilization IV, and The Sims 4 are implemented using Python.

Python is used in many different contexts, such as system programming, web and API programming, GUI applications, gaming and robotics, rapid prototyping, system integration, data science, database applications, real-time communication, and much more. Several prestigious universities have also adopted Python as their main language in computer science courses.

Before talking about the installation of Python on your system, let us tell you about the Python version you will be using in this book.

Python 2 versus Python 3

Python comes in two main versions: Python 2, which is the older version, and Python 3, which is the most recent rendition. The two versions, though similar, are incompatible in some respects.

In the real world, Python 2 is now only running legacy software. Python 3 has been out since 2008, and the lengthy transition phase from Version 2 has mostly come to an end. Python 2 was widely used in the industry, and it took a long time and sometimes a huge effort to make the transition. Some Python 2 software will never be updated to Python 3, simply because the cost and effort involved is not considered worth it. Some companies, therefore, prefer to keep their old legacy systems running just as they are, rather than updating them just for the sake of it.

At the time of writing, Python 2...

We never really understood the point of having a setup section in a book, regardless of what it is that you have to set up. Most of the time, between the time the author writes the instructions and the time you actually try them out, months have passed—if you're lucky. One version change, and things may not work in the way they are described in the book. Luckily, we have the web now, so in order to help you get up and running, we will just give you pointers and objectives.

We are conscious that the majority of readers would probably have preferred to have guidelines in the book. We doubt it would have made their life easier, as we believe that if you want to get started with Python you have to put in that initial effort in order to get familiar with the ecosystem. It is very important, and it will boost your confidence to face the material in the chapters ahead. If you get stuck, remember that Google is your friend—when it comes to setting...

There are a few different ways in which you can run a Python program.

Running Python scripts

Python can be used as a scripting language; in fact, it always proves itself very useful. Scripts are files (usually of small dimensions) that you normally execute to do something like a task. Many developers end up having their own arsenal of tools that they fire when they need to perform a task. For example, you can have scripts to parse data in a format and render it into another one; or you can use a script to work with files and folders; you can create or modify configuration files—technically, there is not much that cannot be done in a script.

It is rather common to have scripts running at a precise time on a server. For example, if your website database needs cleaning every 24 hours (for example, the table that stores the user sessions, which expire pretty quickly but aren't cleaned automatically), you could set up a Cron job that...

Let's talk a little bit about how Python code is organized. In this section, we will start to enter the proverbial rabbit hole and introduce more technical names and concepts.

Starting with the basics, how is Python code organized? Of course, you write your code into files. When you save a file with the extension .py, that file is said to be a Python module.

It would be impractical to save all the code that it is required for software to work within one single file. That solution works for scripts, which are usually not longer than a few hundred lines (and often they are shorter than that).

A complete Python application can...

In this section, we would like to introduce you to some important concepts, such as scope, names, and namespaces. You can read all about Python's execution model in the official language reference (https://docs.python.org/3/reference/executionmodel.html), of course, but we would argue that it is quite technical and abstract, so let us give you a less formal explanation first.

Names and namespaces

Say you are looking for a book, so you go to the library and ask someone to obtain this. They tell you something like Second Floor, Section X, Row Three. So, you go up the stairs, look for Section X, and so on. It would be very different to enter a library where all the books are piled together in random order in one big room. No floors, no sections, no rows, no order. Fetching a book would be extremely hard.

When we write code, we have the same issue: we have to try and organize it so that it will be easy for someone who has no prior knowledge...

Writing good code is not as easy as it seems. As we have already said, good code exposes a long list of qualities that are difficult to combine. Writing good code is, to some extent, an art. Regardless of where on the path you will be happy to settle, there is something that you can embrace that will make your code instantly better: PEP 8.

PEP 8 is perhaps the most famous of all PEPs. It lays out a simple but effective set of guidelines to define Python aesthetics so that we write beautiful Python code. If you take just one suggestion out of this chapter, please let it be this: use PEP 8. Embrace it. You will thank us later.

Coding...

Python has been adopted widely in all coding industries. It is used by many different companies for different purposes, while also being an excellent education tool (it is excellent for that purpose due to its simplicity, making it easy to learn; it encourages good habits for writing readable code; it is platform-agnostic; and it supports modern object-oriented programming paradigms).

One of the reasons Python is so popular today is that the community around it is vast, vibrant, and full of brilliant people. Many events are organized all over the world, mostly either around Python or some of its most adopted web frameworks, such as Django.

Python's source is open, and very often so are the minds of those who embrace it. Check out the community page on the Python website for more information and get involved!

There is another aspect to Python, which revolves around the notion of being Pythonic. It has to do with the fact that Python allows you to use...

Just a few words about IDEs… To follow the examples in this book, you don't need one; any decent text editor will do fine. If you want to have more advanced features, such as syntax coloring and auto-completion, you will have to get yourself an IDE. You can find a comprehensive list of open-source IDEs (just Google "Python IDEs") on the Python website.

Fabrizio uses Visual Studio Code, from Microsoft. It's free to use and it provides an immense multitude of features, which one can expand by installing extensions.

After working for many years with several editors, including Sublime Text, this was the one that felt most productive to him.

Heinrich, on the other hand, is a hardcore Vim user. Although it might have a steep learning curve, Vim is a very powerful text editor that can also be extended with plugins. It also has the benefit of being installed in almost every system a software developer has to work on.

Two important...

In this chapter, we started to explore the world of programming and that of Python. We've barely scratched the surface, only touching upon concepts that will be discussed later on in the book in greater detail.

We talked about Python's main features, who is using it and for what, and the different ways in which we can write a Python program.

In the last part of the chapter, we flew over the fundamental notions of namespaces, scopes, classes, and objects. We also saw how Python code can be organized using modules and packages.

On a practical level, we learned how to install Python on our system, how to make sure we have the tools we need, such as pip, and we also created and activated our first virtual environment. This will allow us to work in a self-contained environment without the risk of compromising the Python system installation.

Now you're ready to start this journey with us. All you need is enthusiasm, an activated virtual environment...