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

[F.L. Whiteley]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: nclug-bounces at nclug.org 
> [mailto:nclug-bounces at nclug.org] On Behalf Of Stephen Warren
> Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2008 09:34
> To: Northern Colorado Linux Users Group
> Subject: Re: [NCLUG] ANN: Fort Collins Pythonistas Kickoff 
> Meeting - 6 Nov 2008 @ 6 pm
> 
> 
> 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.
> 
ConTEXT is an interesting Windows freeware text editor with syntax
highlighting for several languages, including Python
http://www.contexteditor.org/index.html

Frank Whiteley