Note

You do not need any of this to follow the course: on Dodona you write and run all your code in the browser. This page is here for readers who would also like to run Python on their own computer.

To run Python programs, you need a “Python interpreter.” Fortunately, Python interpreters are freely available for almost every machine in existence. Visit http://www.python.org to download a Python interpreter for your computer. Make sure that you get a Python 3 interpreter. Install it. After the installation finishes, in principle you are ready to write and run Python programs.

It does not matter which operating system you use, whether it is Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, or something else: you write the same code for every machine. You can even take a program that you wrote on one machine and copy it to another, which may have a different operating system, and it will probably still run as intended (unless the program has some system-specific content, but I will get to that in a much later chapter).