Note: Andreas Ernst has improvised and updated the repo to python 3, Link

Python is a modern, robust, high level programming language. It is very easy to pick up even if you are completely new to programming.

Mac OS X and Linux comes pre installed with python. Windows users can download python from https://www.python.org/downloads/ .

To install IPython run,

$ pip install ipython[all]

This will install all the necessary dependencies for the notebook, qtconsole, tests etc.

Installing all the necessary libraries might prove troublesome. Anaconda and Canopy comes pre packaged with all the necessary python libraries and also IPython.

Download Anaconda from https://www.continuum.io/downloads

Anaconda is completely free and includes more than 300 python packages. Both python 2.7 and 3.4 options are available.

Download Canopy from https://store.enthought.com/downloads/#default

Canopy has a premium version which offers 300+ python packages. But the free version works just fine. Canopy as of now supports only 2.7 but it comes with its own text editor and IPython environment.

From the terminal

ipython notebook

In Canopy and Anaconda, Open the respective terminals and execute the above.

You can download the pdf copy from here : Get Started with Python

It is better to download all the ipython notebooks from this repository https://github.com/rajathkumarmp/Python-Lectures and learn it on the notebook itself rather than having to refer to a pdf.

Launch ipython notebook from the folder which contains the notebooks. Open each one of them

Cell > All Output > Clear

This will clear all the outputs and now you can understand each statement and learn interactively.

00 - Introduction and Installation

01 - Variable, Operators and Built-in Functions

02 - Print Statement, Precision and FieldWidth

03 - Lists, Tuples and Sets

04 - Strings and Dictionaries

05 - Control Flow Statements

06 - Functions

07 - Classes

These are online read-only versions.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/