Build your very first Python program! Tutorial for beginners

This is a tutorial for very early beginners who want to get their feet we in programming.

We will go over the steps to build a basic Python application.

Prerequisites

Before you start, make sure you have the following:

1. A computer with an internet connection.
2. A text editor or an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) installed on your computer. Some popular IDEs for Python include PyCharm and Spyder.
3. Python 3 installed on your computer. To check if you have Python 3 installed, open a terminal or command prompt and type the following:

python3 -V        

This should print the version number of Python 3 installed on your computer, something like:

Python 3.7.3        

If you do not have Python 3 installed, you can download it from the official Python website.

Steps

1. Open your text editor or IDE and create a new file called main.py. This will be the main file of your application.
2. In the main.py file, write the following code:

# Import the necessary libraries
import sys


# Define a main() function
def main():
? # Print a message
? print("Hello, World!")


# Call the main() function
if __name__ == "__main__":
? main()



         

This code does the following:

1. Imports the sys library, which provides functions and variables used to interact with the interpreter.
2. Defines a main() function, which is the entry point of the application. This function simply prints a "Hello, World!" message to the screen.
3. Calls the main() function if the main.py file is run directly.
4. Save the main.py file and run it from the terminal or command prompt. To do this, navigate to the directory where you saved the main.py file and run the following command:

python3 main.py        

This should print the "Hello, World!" message to the screen.

Next Steps

Congratulations! You have successfully built a basic Python application. You can now try modifying the main() function to do more interesting things. For example, you can add more print statements to print different messages, or you can add some logic to the function to do some calculations.

To learn more about Python and its capabilities, you can check out the official Python documentation. There you will find a wealth of information on Python's built-in functions, modules, and libraries, as well as tutorials and examples to help you learn how to use Python effectively.

*** This article was created using Artificial Intelligence ***