Technical requirements

This chapter is introductory, so we won’t be coding yet and the technical requirements are nil. It’s Chapter 1 and I know you’re all fired up and ready to go and nil is boring. So, let’s get moving!

First, here is what you will need to be successful with this book:

• A computer. I know! It’s obvious, but I pride myself on being complete and leaving nothing to chance!
• An OS. This works best if it is installed on your computer already since we won’t cover how to do that in this book. Windows, macOS, Linux – it’s all the same as far as this book is concerned because PyCharm works in all three, and the UI is nearly identical in each environment.
• An installation of Python. We’re going to be using Python 3 exclusively in this book. There are a few different “flavors” of Python 3 but for the most part, the plain old Python 3 from https://www.python.org will be fine. We’ll get into those “flavors” later when we start talking about virtual environments in Chapter 3, Customizing Interpreters and Virtual Environments. If revision numbers give you comfort, the latest release at the time I’m writing this book is 3.11.1. The Python revision I’m using in that production SaaS app I mentioned earlier is 3.8. If your Python 3 installation is older than that, you should update it.
• At some point, a GitHub account might come in handy since I will be sharing the code from the book using a Git repository.