This video shows you how to download Python and also talks a bit about what a program is. Programs are everywhere on your computer and on the internet. Every time you use a web browser, play a computer game or write a text message on your cell phone, you're using a program. Even your operating system, such as OS10, Linux or Windows is a program. A program is just a set of instructions. We say programs are run or executed. Program, such as your operating system, run on hardware, like a cell phone, or your laptop, or a tablet. But programs can also be run by other programs. This is what happens when you play a game in a web browser. Your web browser knows how to run programs written in a programming language called Java script. This webpage on wikipedia lists all the programming languages that anyone has ever bothered to enter here, and there are hundreds of them. You've probably heard of some of the programming languages. We've heard a lot of them but certainly nowhere near all of them and we doubt that anybody knows all the programming languages listed here. So, Python is a programming language, one of many. In order to learn Python programs, you need to download a program that understands that language much like your browser understands Javascript. In order to work through this course, you will need to download this program from python.org. There are two main versions of Python, Python two and Python three. We're going to use Python three. So, go ahead and click on Quick Links, and this is the download page for Python three, the current version. If you use Linux, you can use your package manager to install Python three. If you use Windows, this link is appropriate. If you use OS ten, one of the recent versions, at least, then this is the appropriate link to click. If you use a Mac, you may need to install something called TickleTK in order to run the, the program we use to write python programs. So, let's just scroll down to the bottom here, if you're a Mac user click on this link, and then scroll down and download Active TCLE.5, .12 or whatever the newest version is. You are going to have to go to the active state website and then just click this big blue download button in order to get that. To write our Python programs we are going to use a program called Idle named after Eric Idle of Monty Python it will comes with Python. Just double click on the icon and hopefully you see a window that looks like
