Python 3 – Lesson 01 ( Installing python 3 and writing your first code )

In this lesson i am going to teach you how to install python 3 to your mac or windows and write your first code. This lesson is part of a series i am going to write in my website. If you have a problem with any of my lessons, feel free to comment under my posts and i will answer asap. First of all you need to download python 3 to your computer and install a good IDE to write python codes. In this tutorial series i am going to using visual studio code as my IDE and i will provide a link to download it. It is 100% free and it has lot of plugins and those plugins will help you to code fast and easily. First of all, we will download and install python 3 to our computer. Please follow this following link to download it. Download Python 3 – https://www.python.org/downloads/ Since i am using mac os, webpage will show the default download option as mac os. But you can simply go to “Download” tab and select your os to download. Remember to download python 3 version instead of python 2. Because both versions have some difference in it’s syntaxes. In this tutorial series we are using python 3. So install the downloaded package as you install any other package. After that we need to verify whether python installed correctly or not. To verify this you need to open a terminal ( in windows, CMD ) and type below code.

python --version

After that you will get your python version. Version number should be something starting with 3. ( Example : Python 3.6.1 ). It depend on the version you have download. After that you are good to go with your first python lesson. Close your terminal or cmd and open your IDE. I am going to you visual studio code and ill put the download link below. first of all , you have to install python plugin to vs code (visual studio code). Download visual studio code – https://code.visualstudio.com/download Visual studio code is a very good and light weight IDE and it is only 30mb – 50mb . If you have sublime text, atom or pycharm, you can use it for this series. VS code can use with windows, Linux or Mac os. Lets write our first code in python 3. We are going to output a single text using python. Before that we need to install python plugin to VS code. Please follow steps from below image. Now we are ready to write our first code in python 3. To output something using python we need to use “Print”. As an example we are going to output “Hello World” text using python.

print ("Hello World!")

Now you need to save the file as a python file. Goto File -> Save as -> give a file name and put the extension as .py in the end. Look at the below example image. now open your terminal or CMD and navigate to the place you saved the python file. In my case Desktop. After that write below code and you will get your output as “Hello world”.

//python filename.py 
//my file name is, hello.py
 //So i am going to type it as below 
python hello.py

This is end of the first lesson and we will talk about user inputs and variables in our next lesson. Please comment under if you have any problem about this lesson. Feel free to go through with other languages and lessons written by other programmers in this website. See you with my next lesson.