Installing Python

How to Install Python - The Right Way –

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKSpANU8jPE

How to install python and should you add it to your path?

Jun 2022

Giles McMullen

Download and install Python: https://www.python.org/

How to learn to code: How to learn any programming language...

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Free Python Resource: https://python-programming.quantecon.org/intro.html

(This is a great introduction to python)

Transcript:

In this video I'm going to show you how to install python and I’m going to answer that question for you; Should you add python to your path? Also. we're going to be concentrating on the official installation of python.

Before we install Python we just need to double check that you don't have it already installed on your computer, because if you do that can cause a few problems.

Press the 'windows key' and select ‘PowerShell’

Open up the power shell;

When the window opens, Type: python --version

Here you can see if python is installed and if you don't have Python installed go to go to ‘python.org’ and download the latest version.

Once it is downloaded, double click on it to run to install it and check the ‘add to path’.

You can launch applications from the Command line or from PowerShell. For example if you want to launch notepad you just type ‘notepad’ that will launch the application. You can do the same with excel - just type excel but how does windows know that? It knows that because it is added to the path. So when you add Python to the path, you're essentially telling the installer to create a shortcut so that when you type Python into the command line or PowerShell python will launch.

In most cases you want to add python to your path. But not always. And the time you don't want to add python to your path is if you've previously installed python and added it to your path before. Because you don't want to end up with lots of different versions of python all added to your path

Also check out ‘virtual environments’ option because if you start coding in python and don't set up virtual environments that can become a little bit messy as you start to do projects further down the line and you'll wish that you'd installed and set up virtual environments.