FastStarting Your Python Experience!!!

We Know…You Are Sick About Being Told It’s Time To Learn Python!!!

But the truth of the matter is simple – Python is a simple programming language capable of big things. It features wide support across network devices.

There are many reasons you should consider learning Python – here are just a few of them:

• It is fun!
• You might not have learned a programming language in a long, long time.
• Python is often used in Software Defined Networking (SDN) environments.
• Did I mention it is fun?
• Python is now a “requirement” for many professional certifications from companies like Cisco, Juniper, AWS, and more

The First Application

I am on a Mac – which provides the luxury of having Python built right in (just like many *nix). For those of you on Windows – head over to python.org/download.

For composing my Python applications – I am using the BBEdit from BareBones.com. After thirty days of the full version, you can continue to use it free for your text editing work. Advanced functionality like Web authoring goes away, but no big deal for me.

I will use BBEdit to create my first Python application. Boom!

print “Hello World!”

print “This is awesome!” 

print “I am a programmer!”

I will save this complex program ;-) as a file named ex1.py.

I will now run this application in the Terminal application in Mac OS. This is done with the commands:

cd python
python ex1.py

Interested in what version of Python you are running?

Try this command:

python –version

Final Thoughts

This is an excellent time to practice with some of your directory and file management skills from within Terminal. I found myself using the following commands in this first application and its execution:

• mkdir – make a directory
• cd – change the directory
• ls – list the contents of a directory