Python is the most popular scripting language being used at the time of this writing, having surpassed perl and being more cross-platform-friendly than bash and other shell scripting languages.

Python is similar to C and perl languages and isn't too hard to pick up of you are familiar with programming. It's also often used for teaching programming. Really, its worth getting familiar with.

I strongly recommend installing python after the Git+MinGW tutorial

Python 2 or 3?

Haha, welcome to the biggest debate in the Universe. My suggestion is, you should stick with Python 2.7 - that's what everything is compatible with. Many programs/scripts and libraries are not Py3 compatible and the changes, while often back-compatible, just aren't ported to older things

So, if you write new code, its a good idea to make em work with Python 3 but I still use Py 2.7

Install Python

Visit https://www.python.org/downloads/ to download the latest version. As of this writing its 2.7.11

Download and run the Installer

The default location C:\Python27\ is a fine place

I do suggest Add python.exe to Path so you can just run it from the command line

Once done, you can start up a new command line and run python

Python Package Management

You will almost certainly want to install a python package manager

Which python pkg manager should I use?

Welcome to the second-biggest debate in the Universe! My suggestion is you stick to pip as it seems to be the most commonly used

Lucky for you, it comes with the Python 2.7 installer above. You can run pip from the command line to check

So say you want to install the python packages click and gitpython - just run pip install click gitpython

and it'll be done for you!

This guide was first published on May 05, 2016. It was last updated on May 05, 2016.

This page (Python) was last updated on May 05, 2016.

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