NOTE: This guide pertains mainly for macOS users. I may write up a Windows version of this guide later on.
One of my old friends once said to me,
“Hey Dean, I really wanna learn how to program. I heard there’s a lot of money in data science, but I’m not sure where to start.”
First of all, there are more than enough guides and blogs that address exactly why career-pivoting from social services into something super technical for the money is a really bad idea, especially when you can’t bother to figure out the damn thermostat, Karen.
If you’re not Karen (or if your name is Karen but you’re not that Karen) and you still want to get started with programming, you already have this super powerful tool called Python (well you probably did spend at least a grand on your computer). Let’s get right into it.
Hold down the command key and press spacebar ( ⌘ + spacebar ) to pull up Spotlight Search.
Next, type ‘terminal’ and select what would ideally be the first result: Terminal — Utilities.
(If for some reason Terminal is not showing in your list, you can access it via Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.)
Select that, and voilà, you’ve gained access to the command terminal.
Granted, my terminal might look a little different from yours.
Go ahead and type “python” and press the Enter key.
$ python Python 2.7.15 (default, Nov 13 2018, 15:23:11) [GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 10.0.0 (clang-1000.11.45.5)] on darwin Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>>
And boom, you’ve entered the Python shell. You can now do cool stuff like…
Print “Hello, World!”
>>> print("Hello, World!") Hello, World!
…or count to ten
>>> for i in range(10): print(i) ... 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
…or get the current time
>>> import datetime >>> datetime.datetime.now() datetime.datetime(2019, 9, 7, 17, 20, 39, 687653)
The possibilities are endless. 🤯