Now you might be suddenly bogged with the question, why Python? According to Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2016 ranking Python ranked third after C and Java. As per Indeed.com's data of 2016, the Python job market search ranked fifth. Clearly, all the data points to the ever rising demand in the job market for Python. Its a cool language if you want to learn just for fun or if you want to build your career around Python, you will adore the language. At school level, many schools have started including Python programming for kids. With new technologies taking the market by surprise Python has been playing a dominant role. Whether it is cloud platform, mobile app development, BigData, IoT with Raspberry Pi, or the new Blockchain technology, Python is being seen as a niche language platform to develop and deliver a scalable and robust applications.
Some key features of the language are:
- Python programs can run on any platform, you can carry code created in Windows machine and run it on Mac or Linux
- Python has inbuilt large library with prebuilt and portable functionality, also known as the standard library
- Python is an expressive language
- Python is free and open source
- Python code is about one third of the size of equivalent C++ and Java code
- Python can be both dynamically and strongly typed--dynamically typed means it is a type of variable that is interpreted at runtime, which means, in Python, there is no need to define the type (
int
orfloat
) of the variable
One of the most famous platforms where Python is extensively used is YouTube. The other places where you will find Python being extensively used are the special effects in Hollywood movies, drug evolution and discovery, traffic control systems, ERP systems, cloud hosting, e-commerce platform, CRM systems, and whatever field you can think of.
At the time of writing this book, two main versions of the Python programming language were available in the market, which are Python 2.x and Python 3.x. The stable release as of writing the book were Python 2.7.13 and Python 3.6.0.