Introduction to Python

Evolution of Python.

 -Python was developed by Guido Van Rossum in the late eighties at the ' National Research Institute       for Mathematics and Computer Science, at Netherlands.

 Python Editions 

  - Python 1.0

  - Python 2.0

  - Python 3.0

Advantages of  using Python

- Python has several features that make it well suited for data science

- Open source and community development 

- Developed under Open Source Intiative approved license making it free to use and      distribute even commercially

- Syntax used is simple to understand and code 

- Libraries designed for specific data science tasks 

- Combines well with majority of the cloud platform service providers

Integrated development enviroment (IDE)

- Software application consisiting of a cohesive unit of tools required for development

- Designed to simplify software development

- Utilities Provided by IDEs include tools for managing, compiling, deploying and debugging software

Feature of IDE 

- IDE should centralize three key tools nthat form the crux of software development 

- Syntax and error highlighting 

-  Code completion 

- Version control

Commonly used IDEs

-Spyder

-PyCharm

-Jupyter Notebook

-Atom

But in this course we are going to be looking at jupyter notebook; and that is primarily because it is a very good software that has been developed only for data science and python; and it as an interface that is very very appealing and easy to use for beginners.

Jupyter Notebook

-Web application that allows creation and manipulation of notebook documents called 'notebook',

-Supported across Linux, Mac Os X and windows platforms.

-Available as open source version.

-Bundled with Anaconda distribution or can be installed seperately.

-Supports Julia, Python, R and Scala.

 

-Consists of ordered collection of input and output cells that contain code,text,plots etc.

-Allows sharing of code and narrative text through output format likePDF,HTML etc.