Python Fundamentals for Beginners

Introduction

In this post, I am going to talk about python fundamentals for beginners. I am saying beginners means who does not know anything about python.

So python is a programming language which is developed by Guido Van Rossam in 1989. That means it is older than Java programming language.

But it’s official year is 1991. In this year, it is made available to the public.

Anyone can learn python. There is no need to have a knowledge of any programming language. Even a school student can learn python in a very short amount of time. I am just trying to say that this is a very easy programming language.

Now a days, it is recommended as a first programming language for beginners.

Hello World Program in Python

It is a tradition that before starting any programming language, we must know how to write a program to print the string “Hello World”. We will also follow this tradition. So see the following python program.

print("Hello World")

Thats it. This is the python program to print the string “Hello World”. As you can see, this is just like writing a english statement. This is the program of python 3. In python 2, there is no parenthesis. We can simply write print “Hello World”. But, we will not talk about python 2.

Features of Python

In this post, I will talk only about python fundamentals. I am writing this article only for beginners.

• It is a high level programming language. In simple words, high level programming language is nothing but language which can be read and understood by humans. Because machine can understand only 0’s and 1’s i.e. machine language or low level language.
• It is free and open source programming language. What does this mean? There are many programming languages or softwares which are not free. That means we need a license. But for using python, there is no need to have a license. It is open source programming language becuase we can customized it as per our requirement. For example, jython, cpython etc.
• It is an interpreted language. Here, we don’t need to compile the program. It is done internally. For this python interpreter is there. Here, step by step execution is happened.
• Python programs can be easily understood. Because it has very simple syntax and simple structure. You can see the above hello world program in python.
• This is portable and platform-independent language. We don’t need to worry about portabilty of python program. It can execute on any machine or platform. You will get the same result.
• It has rich set of libraries. We can develop any type of applications using python programs because it has rich set of inbuilt libraries. You can directly use it in your program.
• Embeded: We can embed python programs in any other programming language.
• Python is also an extensible programming language. What does this mean? We can include any other programs(different programming language) in our python program.
• Dynamically typed programming language. This is the most important feature of python programming language. In other programming languages like C, C++, Java etc., we need to declare a type of a variable before using it. But in python, there is no need to declare the type. PVM i.e. Python Virtual Machine do this for you.

I can add 10 to 20 features of python programming language. But I think, these are the most important features.

Python Versions

Currently there are only three versions of python and they are Python 1.X.X, Python 2.X.X and 3.X.X. Here, X.X means integer numbers like Python 2.7, Python 3.10 and so on. The latest version is Python 3.11.0 which is released on 8/8/2022.

Python Documentation

No website can give you detailed knowledge. For this you should learn to read documentation. Most people find it very boring job. But I would recommend you to make a habit of reading documentation. It will give you more clarity. I am not talking only about python. For every programming language or any software, there is always a documentation.

As a beginner, it will not be easy for you.

I would suggest you to go to the official website of python. Here, you can find python documentations and the versions availabe to download.

This is just article about python fundamentals for beginners. In the next article, we will learn how to work with python.

I hope, you have understood this article. For learning python as beginners, you must know the fundamentals.

If you have any query related to above article or any other programming language, please contact me. I will try my best to solve your query.

Thank you.