Getting Started with Python

The Python language had a humble beginning in the late 1980s when a Dutchman Guido Von Rossum started working on a fun project, which would be a successor to ABC language with better exception handling and capability to interface with OS Amoeba at Centrum Wiskunde and Informatica. It first appeared in 1991. Python 2.0 was released in the year 2000 and Python 3.0 was released in the year 2008. The language was named Python after the famous British television comedy show Monty Python's Flying Circus, which was one of Guido's favorite television programmes. Here we will see why Python has suddenly influenced our lives and the various applications that use Python and its implementations. In this chapter, you will be learning the basic installation steps that are required to perform on different platforms (that is Windows, Linux, and Mac), about environment variables, setting up of environment variables, file formats, Python interactive shell, basic syntaxes and finally printing out formatted output.