Python Introduction

First, off Python usually requires some setup by downloading the Python IDLE. The Python IDLE is basically a text editor that lets you execute Python code. If you want to use Python as a server-side language, you certainly can. Python can output HTML just like other languages can, but Python is more commonly used as a module rather than intertwined like some PHP or ColdFusion. As for right now, I recommend you download the IDLE to help you debug your code while we learn the fundamentals offline. One really quick note, we are using python 3.2. Before we go to an example, please understand that Python is space sensitive. This means you must have 4 spaces for each indentation every single time. We'll get into this more later, now let's go to an example.

You can see right off the bat, that we use print() a whole lot. Basically, all it does is output whatever is inside the parentheses. You will be doing lots of printing so, you can get more comfortable with it as we go. Print is a function that we will go into later, but just understand that it can take a value. On the first line, we provide a string value "My first Python code!", which is a string because of the quotes. So, you just told Python to output that string to the console. Python completes that task and moves onto the next line where it prints out a different string.

See how simple that was? Well, get used to it. Python is probably one of the simplest looking languages that can do some of the most powerful things you can imagine. You can see from the example how clean Python's syntax is without all of the extra stuff that other languages add. That covers the easiest Python statement you will ever write. In the following sections, we will be using more advanced functions and teaching you the fundamentals of Python.