This guide is intended to function as a quick start to setting up a Python programming environment and appropriate virtual environments.
Along with instructions for installation, this guide provides links to external resources for learning Python, and an explanation of the importance of a few commonly-used Python modules for data manipulation and visualization that do not come pre-installed in the Python standard library.
Python is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted programming language. As a high-level language, Python is fairly abstracted from machine code, so for the most part you won't have to bother with things like handling individual bytes or allocating memory. As a general-purpose language, Python can be used to run the full gamut of projects, from fully featured applications and websites down to one-off scripts that accomplish specific tasks.
Many other languages are constructed such that their code must be "compiled" into an application/executable file before it is run. Python code is compiled as it is run, or "just in time", by something called an interpreter, allowing for newly-written code to be deployed much more quickly. Python is preferred by many as a scripting language for small projects.
Python is more human-readable than most other programming languages. Additionally, accomplishing a task often requires fewer lines of code in Python than it would most other languages.
Official documentation for beginners is available on both the Python wiki and the python.org Documentation page.
There are many resources available online for those who want to learn Python. Please note that while some Coursera courses are free, access to many courses require a paid subscription not provided by the Claremont Colleges Library.
Constellate is an online platform for learning techniques for handling text data in Python and R. Not only does it cover advanced natural language processing techniques, but it also features a series of labs that provide a robust and thorough introduction to basic and intermediate concepts in Python programming. See the Text & Data Mining Subject Guide for more details.
Please note: Constellate will be officially sunsetted as of July 1, 2025, per this announcment: https://constellate.org/docs/constellate-sunset?ref=cms-prod.constellate.org
The Claremont Colleges Library's GitHub page hosts repositories for past workshops. These workshops are in Jupyter Notebook format (.ipynb). To use these materials, either use Google Colab to open the GitHub link (see the box above: "Learning Python: Colab"), or download the files to your local hard drive and use Jupyter Notebook or JupyterLab to open them (see the page: "Installing Python").
