Python installation and setup on Windows

This book is based on the latest Python 3 version. All the code that will be used in this book is written in Python 3, so we need to install Python 3 before we can start coding. Python is an open source, distributed, and freely available language. It is also licensed for commercial use. There are many implementations of Python, including commercial implementations and distributions. In this book, we will focus on the standard Python implementation, which is guaranteed to be compatible with NumPy.

You can download Python 3.9.x from the Python official website: https://www.python.org/downloads/. Here, you can find installation files for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and other OS platforms. You can find instructions for installing and using Python for various operating systems at https://docs.python.org/3.7/using/index.html.

You need to have Python 3.5.x or above installed on your system. The sunset date for Python 2.7 was moved from 2015 to 2020, but at the time of writing, Python 2.7 will not be supported and maintained by the Python community.

At the time of writing this book, we had Python 3.8.3  installed as a prerequisite on our Windows 10 virtual machine: https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.8.3/python-3.8.3.exe.