Python

Python is a high-level, general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with the use of significant indentation. Python was created by Guido van Rossum in the early 90s. It is now one of the most popular languages in existence.

Being that the language puts so much emphasis on readability it is considered to be a very easy language to initially learn, but can still be complex to master. Note This guide is going to cover Python 3 specifically, although other versions of Python are quite similar, they are past EOL.

Python Fundamentals

This section is going to cover the basic fundamentals of Python. If you are fairly versed in other programming languages you can probably skip this section. Python does not use ; to terminate its statements like other programming languages.

Comments

Comments in Python use the # to dictate single line comments in and three "'s to indicate multi line comments. Multi line comments are often used for documentation:

# This is a single line comments

""" This however is a multiline comment where I may take the time to describe
    what this program will do or how to use it.
"""

Data Types

Like many other programming languages python supports many of the common data types, but unlike many other programming languages Python does not require you to define a data type for a variable before assigning them value or using them:

a = 5
b = "hello"
c = 'w'
d = 4.3

Boolean values in python are treated as 1 and 0 and can be used as such:

# Note the capitalization
True  # => True
False # => False

# Since they are treated as 1 and 0 we can do the following:
True + True # => 2
True * 9    # => 9
False - 6   # => -6

Operators

Python has all of the common operators you may expect in a programming language. Some of these include:

# Standard math operations
1 + 3   # => 4
9 - 2   # => 7
14 * 2  # => 28
40 / 5  # => 8.0

# The result of division is always a float
10.0 / 3 # => 3.3333333333333335

# Exponentiation (x**y, x to the yth power)
2**4 # => 16

# You can also force precedence with parentheses
1 + 3 * 2   # => 7
(1 + 3) * 2 # => 8

# Modulo operation (remainder)
7 % 3  # => 1
-7 % 3 # => 2

# Python gives us a not operator for negation
not True  # => False
not False # => True

# Python also give us logic operators like or and and
True and False # => False
True or False  # => True

# Comparison operators look for the numerical value of True and False
0 == False  # => True
2 > True    # => True
2 == True   # => False
-5 != False # => True