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New To Python

Thomas Wouters thomas at xs4all.net
Sun Jan 2 19:52:19 EST 2000 
On Sun, Jan 02, 2000 at 06:31:17PM -0500, Gary N. Potts wrote:

> I'm brand new to Python and really to programming.  I've dabbled a bit by
> programming muds and the like, but nothing real.  I've downloaded Python
> 1.5.2 and all the documentation to go with it.  I've found several help
> sites that are able to teach me the language, however, I have not been able
> to find a decent instructional guide on how to actually use the program
> itself.  Is there any good tutorials for that purpose out there and if so,
> were can they be found?

The Python Tutorial at http://www.python.org/doc/tut/ starts off with some
instructions on how to use the program interactively. (Chapter 2. Using the
Python Interpreter) It goes on about how to use it in scripts, the #!
notation, etc. The Tutorial is an excellent starting place -- it doesn't go
too deep into technicalities, but there's plenty of other reading material
once you've finished it. (See http://www.python.org/doc/)

>From the way you phrase the question, however, I think you may be asking the
wrong thing :) However great fun the python interpreter may be,
interactively, it isn't what python is all about. The interpreter is only
the tool that executes the scripts. You write a script, and you tell a
python interpreter to execute it. So maybe you aren't looking for help on
the python program itself, but are actually looking for an Integrated
DeveLopment Enviroment for python.

Well, if so, you're in luck. Python has (at least) one of those, and it's
named IDLE. It should run on any OS with Tkinter support, which includes
Windows, Macintosh and a lot, if not all, flavors of UNIX. For Windows,
there is also the PythonWin IDE, which comes with Mark Hammond's win32all
PythonWin package (See the Win95 section of the download page on
http://www.python.org/download/ for more details.)

IDLE should be included with the Python 1.5.2 you downloaded. If you're
using some flavor of UNIX and python got installed by your vendor, you might
be missing IDLE and/or Tkinter... You'll either need to download the source
(and compile, if you're missing Tkinter) or, if you're using Linux, check
out the Linux Binaries section of the download page.

IDLE-fingers-ly y'rs

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas at xs4all.net>

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