Getting started with Python
Why Python?
The Python programming language has become the de-facto standard for working on Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. There are a number of reasons for this.
Open-source software
Python is open-source software which means that you do not need to go through a complex licensing processing in order to install it, and you can use it without agreeing to a complex and baroque commercial end-user license-agreement (EULA).
Cross-platform
Python works on any operating system (MacOS, Windows, or Linux), and can be used on your own computer or in the cloud.
Vast ecosystem
Software developers talk about the "ecosystem" of software components. This refers to all of the other software that interoperates with or enhances a particular piece of software. Because Python is portable and open-source many developers around the world have built powerful libraries of Python software which you can easily use in your own programs. These include:
Plotly for interactive graphs
SciPy for scientific computing
TensorFlow for Artificial Intelligence
and thousands of others.
Interactivity
Python is an interpreted programming language, which means that you can type small pieces of Python code and see the results immediately. This makes it very easy to learn, since the best way to learn anything is to practice and get to feedback. By typing code and seeing the results immediately you can practice coding very easily. You can try this straightaway at https://www.online-python.com.
Jupyter notebooks
The interactive nature of Python lends itself to creating dynamic documents. We can write code to analyse data, plot graphs and visualisations in a similar way to a spreadsheet, but offering much more versatility and advanced analytics. You can try this straightaway at jupyter.org.
Next steps
There are lots of different ways of installing and using Python (techies sometimes talk about different "distributions" or "distros" of Python). The easiest way to install Python if you want to work with data is to install Anaconda Python. Here is a video that walks you though installing it.
Using the Spyder IDE
There are lots of different ways of managing Python programs and running Python code. The most versatile approach is to use something called an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) which is just a fancy of way of saying that we have a text-editor (a bit like Microsoft Notepad) and lots of other tools for managing our code in a single app. Anaconda Python comes with an IDE called Spyder, which you can learn more about in the video below.
Learning Python coding
There are huge numbers of tutorials and text-books on programming in Python. Here are a few recommendations to get you started:
My own lecture notes on Python.
A free course Introduction to Python.