Setting up Your Environment on Windows (Optional) Windows computers don't usually come with Python preinstalled. To check if your computer already has Python installed, run the command we talked about earlier, python--version. No, no Python here. Python isn't installed on this computer, so we'll need to install it. There are a bunch of ways to do this on Windows. We can download the installable package from the official website and install that one, get it from the store if we're using Windows 10, or we can use a package management system called Chocolatey to manage the installation. For this video, we're just going to install the package from the official website. But if you'd like to get a taste of Chocolatey, you can check it out and download it on your own, because who doesn't like things a little extra chocolatey, right? To find the installer, go to the official download page for windows. On this page, we can download the executable installer for Python-3 64-bit architecture. Most computers today are installed with 64-bit installations. So if you don't know which one to pick, pick that one, unless you know for sure that your computer is running a 32-bit installation. Once the executable installer has downloaded, we want to run it. This will install a new software on our machine, so we need to run it as administrator user. Before clicking install now, make sure you click on the add Python 3.7 to Path box. The path variable instructs the operating system to look for executables and certain directories of our system when running commands from the terminal. You want to have that box selected so that python interpreter gets executed when we invoke it from the command line. Great, it's installing. It might take a moment. Now that it's done, we can test to see that it worked. We do this by opening a new PowerShell and executing the same command as before. Nice. We now have an executable Python interpreter that we can use for testing the scripts that we write. As we called out, just because we've got Python-3 installed, it doesn't mean that we have the modules we might need for every possible script. Let's say we're tasked with writing some automation that extracts information out of a website. To get the contents of a website from Python, we can choose the request module, which is used for interacting with web services. First, let's check whether we have this module already available. Darn. The interpreter tells us that the module isn't available. Let's install it using Pip. To do that, we'll call pip install request from the command line, not the interpreter. We've now got the module installed. Let's try to import it again from the interpreter. Awesome, it worked. Just to double-check that, let's try to do something with this module. For example, we can use the get function to get the contents of a website. So the get function process the website and the response object now has its contents. We can do a bunch of things with it. How about we check the length of the response to text using the LEN function. Fantastic. Now that we have Python's setup on our Windows environment, we are ready to have some fun with it. Feel free to explore on your own and try some things out. Up next, I'll show you how to install Python on macOS. You can check that one out or you can skip ahead, it's up to you. Pointers for Getting Your Environment Setup Learning more about operating systems We’ve talked briefly about what an operating system is and what we'll need to know about operating systems for this course. If you want to learn some additional operating system concepts, check out the videos on this subject in the Technical Support Fundamentals course. https://www.coursera.org/learn/technical-support-fundamentals If you want to explore how to manage Windows and Linux, check out the Operating Systems and You: Becoming a Power User course. https://www.coursera.org/learn/os-power-user If you want to discover more about the history of Unix, you can read all the details on the Unix Wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix Installing Python and additional modules If you don't have Python installed yet, we recommend that you visit the official Python website and download the installer that corresponds to your operating system. https://www.python.org/ There’s a bunch of guides out there for installing Python and they all follow a similar process to the one we described in the videos. This guide from Real Python includes instructions on how to install python on a range of different operating systems and distributions. https://realpython.com/installing-python/ Once you have Python installed on your operating system, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with pip and the associated tools. You can find more info about these here. https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/installing-using-pip-and-virtual-environments/ Using package management systems Package management systems help you better manage the software installed on your machine. These management systems vary a lot from operating system to operating system. So, you need to pick the one that works for the OS you’re using. Check out these guides for help with this: Installing Python 3 on Windows 10 with Chocolatey https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-python-3-and-set-up-a-local-programming-environment-on-windows-10 Installing Python 3 on MacOS with Homebrew https://programwithus.com/learn/python/install-python3-mac Package management basics on Linux https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/package-management-basics-apt-yum-dnf-pkg Other information Python in the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/python-in-the-windows-10-may-2019-update/