Which Python Should I download?

So you’re thinking of starting out with python programming but you’re not sure of the many packages on the python site you should download. We’ve all been there, and it’s a hard decision to make for a beginner, especially if it’s the first time you’ve had to setup a programming environment.

Which Version Of Python Do You Need?

This might depend on what type of project you are working on or if you’re inheriting a project that’s already written in a specific python version. A good rule of thumb is to always go with the latest possible version of python. Let’s say for instance that you forked a repo with code that was already written in python 2. You probably want to stick with python 2 if the code base is large and it would be burdensome to convert everything to 3(although not impossible to do so). On the other hand, if the project is already in python 3, there’s really no reason to go back to 2 unless you have some kind of constraint on the deployment server or environment where your code will run. If you’re starting a project for the first time, its a great opportunity to just dive right into python 3, and I highly recommend you do so. Check out my blog post on why you should break up with python 2 here. At the time of this writing, the latest recommended python version if 3.7.4.

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Where should you get Python?

Python offers these downloads for free on their website, so don’t be led astray by anyone trying to lead you along a long chain of urls to get the python binary you want.

Next Steps

If this is your first time writing python, please consider reading my beginners tutorial in python.

If you’re already familiar with python and you want to get the best development environment setup, I would recommend getting pip and venv installed as well. Pip is a packages manager for python that will make it a whole lot easier for you to install python packages with a single command. Venv will allow you to create virtual environments on your machine, which is a cool way to setup multiple versions of python(if you so wish), or different configurations, which comes in handy if you’re doing any kind of web development in python.