In this chapter, we will review how to set up the Python 2.7 32-bit edition on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu Linux. We will walk through the Python interpreter and build a few Hello-World-style Python applications to ensure our code is working properly. This will be covered primarily in the Windows section of the chapter, but it will be reiterated in other OS sections.

We will also review how to install and use easy_install and pip, which are package managers that are commonly used in Python development. We will also review how to install lxml, which is a popular xml parser and writer that we will need in later chapters.