This chapter will provide an introduction to Python, focusing primarily on data types, variables, expressions, and program structures that the Python programming language follows. The objective of this chapter is to familiarize the reader with the basics of Python so that they can use it in the upcoming chapters. The chapter will cover the installation of Python and its dependency manager. We will also start taking a look at scripting in Python.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• An introduction to Python (including its installation and setup)
• Basic data types
• Sequence data types – lists, dictionaries, tuples
• Variables and keywords
• Operations and expressions