[NCLUG] ANN: Fort Collins Pythonistas Kickoff Meeting - 6 Nov 2008 @ 6 pm

[Stephen Warren]

On Tue, October 21, 2008 8:38 pm, Jim Hutchinson wrote:
> Just a couple follow up
> questions. What software will we need? I know I can do Python in a
> terminal on a Linux box, but what IDE, if any, is suggested? What if
> people will be using a Mac or, gasp, windows computer?

Linux: Practically any Linux system already has Python installed. If not,
I'm sure we can help the user get it installed at the session.

(I assume CSU has open access Wifi/LAN?)

Mac: Comes with Python already installed, I believe.

Windows: Need to download the Python installer from
http://www.python.org/download/ We can help you install it at the session
if needed.

I suggest getting 2.6 since 3.0 has just come out and most existing code
is 2.6 compatible. I doubt it'll make a huge difference at this stage of
learning though (many new 3.0 features have been back-ported to 2.6, so
you can still use them, but 2.6 hasn't removed the stuff that makes 3.0
not backwards compatible)

Any text editor can be used for Python, even notepad on Windows or gedit
on Linux. I don't know what editors the Mac has, but I imagine it ships
with some basic plain text editor.

Windows: I personally use either the "plain" text editor textpad
(textpad.com; shareware) or MS Visual Studio/MS Visual C++ IDE for editing
text. (The IDE features aren't useful, but it's a perfectly good text
editor.)

There's also wing (wingware.com) which is a nice (non-free) Python IDE
with features somewhat equivalent to MS's C++/VB environments. It's a
little pricey for speculative purchases if I recall correctly, although
there is a free demo I believe.