Appendix Installing Python

This appendix covers

• Which versions of Python are available, and which to use
• Installing Python on your computer

Python is fairly portable software that can be compiled from source on most systems. Fortunately for you, Python is probably also available prebuilt for your system. This appendix will help you get set up with Python so you can run any of the code in this book from the command line.

Tip

If you’ve already installed a version of Python 3 on your computer, you’re in luck. There’s not much more to do here. Feel free to get back to reading, and follow along with the code in this book.

Note

If you install a version of Python 3, you will almost certainly need to use the python3 command when running code. python is reserved for a different Python installation on many operating systems (see section A.2).