Hello everybody and welcome back to our second tutorial. And right now let's talk
a little bit about Python before we actually download it. Now, first of all,
what is Python for those of you that are absolute beginners? Python is a
programming language. Well, most likely all of you actually knew that, but Python
is a high-level programming language. Which basically means that it is rather
easy, and you can actually write programs rather faster
than in some other different languages. Such as, for example, if you want to
compare C language and Python language, something that will take around 10 pages,
or basically 10 pages of a code, to write in C, will take about one or two pages in
Python. It is a programming language used when you need something done really fast.
It is also a slower language than C. For example, because it is a high-level
language, it is more far away to the processor, we can say so, and therefore
it is not as fast as different programming languages that are low-level,
such as C, or assembly, or basically any other low-level programming language. Now
Python is also known as a scripting language.
Well, basically, what Python allows you to do is actually just write simple scripts
that will do simple tasks for you. Therefore, it is called a scripting
language. Now even in Python there is something called IDLE, which basically
look similar to a command shell. And what you can do there is give simple
instructions to Python, and there you can test your programs. But we will talk more
about that later on once we download the actual Python. And by the way,
Python 3, of course, can be downloaded for free. As I said, I will show both on
Linux and Windows. And as I said in the previous video, there are two versions of
Python, Python 2 and Python 3. We are going to use Python 3, the newest version. Now of
course if there is a newer version of Python available once you
actually watch this course, whether it is in 2019 or some other year, feel free to
download the newest version. I believe everything will work the same. So, what is
Python even used for? Well, Python, professionally
you can use it. It is great for back-end web development. You can
analyze data, parse data. For example, when you have a huge pile of data, you can use
some different libraries, such as regex, in order to extract some of the things
that you need from that certain pile of data. Now that is
just some of the uses for Python. It is also starting to have its appearance in
artificial intelligence and scientific computing. Now
many developers also use Python to build productivity tools. Different
games, desktop apps, and basically Python 3 is a rather popular language.
So, you will find a bunch of tutorials online for it. It is nothing
really that unknown, there are plenty of resources to help you learn Python 3. It
is also widely used on the server side, and it is, as I said, widely used for
scripting. Now this includes, basically, various testing, building deployment,
monitoring frameworks, monitoring scientific apps, and just writing some
quick scripts, as we said before. Now Python is also widely used as an
embedded language. Now one thing that you might actually be asking is whether you
need something to start Python programming? Well as we said before, it is
free to download, so that is something out of the way. You don't need any other
knowledge. I will basically begin from the beginning, from the basics themselves, and
we will then build up our knowledge to more intermediate and later more
advanced stuff. So, no, is the answer. You do not need any Python programming
knowledge, or experience, or any other programming experience. If this is your
first programming language that you encounter, feel free to enjoy this course.
We will explain everything in great detail, so nothing to worry about there.
So, let us just end this real quick. And in the next video we are finally going
to download Python 3 and see how it works. So I hope you enjoyed this tutorial,
and I hope I see you in the next one. Bye!