IDEs for Python

The IDE or the Integrated Development Environment is a software that provides the source-code editor cum debugger for the purpose of writing code. Using these software, one can write, test, and debug a code snippet before adding the snippet in the production version of the code.

IDLE: IDLE is the default Integrated Development Environment for Python that comes with the default implementation of Python. It comes with the following features:

IDLE is widely popular as an IDE for beginners; it is simple to use and works well for simple tasks. Some of the issues with IDLE are bad output reporting, absence of line numbering options, and so on. As a result, advanced practitioners move on to better IDEs.

IPython Notebook: IPython Notebook is a powerful computational environment where code, execution, results, and media can co-exist in one single document. There are two components of this computing environment:

The IPython documents are stored with an extension .ipynb in the directory where it is installed on the computer.

Some of the features of IPython Notebook are as follows:

Spyder: Spyder is a powerful scientific computing and development environment for Python. It has the following features:

In this book, IPython Notebook and Spyder have been used extensively. IDLE has been used from time to time and some people use other environments, such as Pycharm. Readers of this book are free to use such editors if they are more comfortable with them. However, they should make sure that all the required packages are working fine in those environments.