Downloading and installing Python
The topic of this section is downloading and installing the Python runtime and standard library. For this, let's first take a look at the download page, https://www.python.org/, which is, of course, the authoritative place to find Python. You will learn a little bit about which versions of Python exist and the one we should choose for this book. Then, we'll move on to how to set up Python for this book. Finally, we'll check that everything worked the way we wanted.
Before we can really begin working with Python, we need to make sure we've got the language interpreter and libraries properly installed. The first step for that is to decide which version of the language to install.
Choosing a suitable version
There are currently two common varieties of Python in use. One of them is Python version 2.7, which is the final version of the Python 2 series. The Python community has promised to maintain version 2.7 independently, making it a very stable target for development...
