Читать книгу Introduction to Python Programming for Business and Social Science Applications - Frederick Kaefer - Страница 29

In this chapter, we learned that Python is free and open-source software (FOSS) and that more than 212,000 projects with packages written in Python are available to use and modify in the Python Package Index. The specific goal of this book is to teach Python programming to those in the fields of social sciences and business to develop applications using Python packages for data analytics. We next learned how to install Python on our computer and that there are different versions of Python. We also learned that using different operating systems and different versions of Python can affect how we write and execute Python code. We then learned how to write and execute Python code in the IDLE shell window and how to write and execute Python code that we save in plain text files. Using files enables the storing and execution of many lines of code as a program that we can save and run later. We also learned how to use package managers for convenient organization and management of libraries of code. Learning to install individual packages is an important skill to take advantage of the many Python packages for both business and social sciences purposes that are available to the Python programming community. Last, we learned about the Chicago Taxi Trips and General Social Survey data sets, which we will use throughout the text.

In the next chapter, we will cover the basic elements of Python code, using the IDLE IDE to illustrate the outcomes of executing each code example. All coding examples in the textbook (including all Stop, Code, and Understand! exercises and their solutions) are available on the companion website to download and execute. We use the figure numbers in the file names of the code examples for easy reference. These code examples are also an example of FOSS, as you can freely modify them and use them in other applications.