Python programming is awesome because it's a general-purpose language that allows you to create any kind of software. It's beginner-friendly with straightforward syntax, and it has a large community on platforms like StackOverflow. Python was created by Guido van Rossum, a Dutch programmer who is best known for this contribution. The name 'Python' comes from an old BBC television comedy sketch series called Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
The Zen of Python is a collection of 19 guiding principles that influence the design of Python. To use the Python interpreter, you need to open a command-line terminal and type the command "python3" (or "python" on Windows). This runs the interpreter program directly, and you can then use the interpreter to execute Python code.
In Python, you can print text and variables using the print function. For example, if you have a variable x with a value of 10, you can print it with print(x). You can also print text and variables together like print("The value of x is", x).
Strings in Python are used for storing text. You can create a string by enclosing text in quotes. For example, greeting = "Hello World" creates a string with the text "Hello World". Indexing and slicing are two operations you can perform on strings in Python. Indexing allows you to access individual characters in a string, while slicing lets you access a range or subset of the string.
The official Python coding style is defined in PEP 8, which provides guidelines for almost everything from naming to spacing. You can check your code against these guidelines using tools like pycodestyle.