Introduction

Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. It mostly uses English keywords and elegant syntax that makes the language easy to read and understand. It can run on any OS (Linux, Unix, Mac OS X, Windows and even Android and IOS).

Rather than building all of its functionality into its core, Python was designed to be highly extensible via modules. This compact modularity has made it particularly popular as a means of adding programmable interfaces to existing applications.

It is FREE 🥳.
It doesn't cost anything to download and use. It can also be freely modified and re-distributed open-source license.

Main Features

Data Typing

Python has typed objects but untyped variable names which means that the variable can store a value of any data type and the type of the value stored in the variable can be changed at runtime.

Here are few examples,

my_variable = 10
print("1st assignment: ", type(my_variable))

my_variable = 10.54
print("2nd assignment: ", type(my_variable))

my_variable = "Test"
print("3rd assignment: ", type(my_variable))

my_variable = ()
print("4th assignment: ", type(my_variable))

my_variable = {}
print("5th assignment: ", type(my_variable))

Output,

1st assignment:  <class 'int'>
2nd assignment:  <class 'float'>
3rd assignment:  <class 'str'>
4th assignment:  <class 'tuple'>
5th assignment:  <class 'dict'>

Object-Oriented

Python supports object-oriented programming with classes and multiple inheritances. The class statement, which executes a block of code and attaches its local namespace to a class, for use in object-oriented programming

Memory Management

Puython uses a combination of reference counting and a cycle-detecting garbage collector for memory management. This automatic memory management frees you from having to manually allocate and free memory in your code.

Exception Handling

Errors detected during execution are called exceptions and they are not aways fatal. Python has a fewer syntactic exception. It makes the error handling cleaner.
The programers can write their own user-defined exceptions derived from the Exception class. Most exceptions are defined with names that end in Error, similar to the naming of the standard exceptions. Many standard modules define their own exceptions to report errors that may occur in functions they define.

Predefined Clean-up Actions

Some objects define standard clean-up actions to be undertaken when the object is no longer needed. The with statement clarifies code to ensure that clean-up code is executed when the object goes out of scope.

Jupyter Notebook

There are many ways to run python statements. One of the popular ways is Jupyter Notebook. We are going to have one Jupyter Notebook for each chapter. Please check this manual for more details on Jupyter Notebook.

Install

Install ipython and jupyter

with conda:

conda install ipython jupyter

with pip:

pip install --upgrade ipython jupyter

Clone this project

git clone https://github.com/periask/LearningPython.git

Start the notebook

cd LearningPython
jupyter notebook