The best platform and editor for Python

[Jason]

On Jul 1, 1:10 pm, kimiraikkonen <kimiraikkone... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> For experienced with Pyhton users, which developing software and
> enviroment would you suggest for Pyhton programming? Compiler+Editor
> +Debugger.

That would depend on what platform(s) you would be developing on, what
development environments you were used to, and so forth.  I personally
enjoy working in Eclipse with the PyDev plugin.  Other people love
Emacs.  I know folk who you'll only pry their vim editors from their
cold, dead fingers.

For people dipping their toes into the Python pool, I recommend using
Idle.  It comes with Python itself, and has a built-in debugger (see
the Debug menu), syntax highlighting, and other goodies.  It's
certainly enough to write your programs in.

Quite frankly, you can use Windows Notepad to write your Python
programs.  Python itself is just a language.  There is no single
environment that Python ties to itself tightly.  The basic debugger,
PDB, is built in as a Python module, so you can use Python to debug
itself.  Most of the IDE's that provide debuggers are merely placing a
nice wrapper over the python debugger.

To develop very short programs, I often start Python on my command
line and fiddle away.

> Also what are your suggestions for beginners of Pyhton programming?

Don't worry about making GUI programs at first.  GUIs are present in
every operating system, but they are an additional level of
complexity.  Get the language down, first, then head into the world of
graphical user interfaces.

Start programming.  See "Dive Into Python"[1].  Check out the
Beginner's section of the Python Wiki[2].  The hardest part about
learning to programming is learning to structure your thoughts into a
coherent series of logical units.  The rest is just code, and code is
easy.  It's the damn thinking that's so hard.

Get familiar with the Python documentation.  If you are under Windows,
the Python docs are installed with Python in Microsoft's Compiled Help
format, so you can browse them via the contents, look things up in the
index, and search via the search tab.  Remember that the built-in
stuff, like lists and dictionaries, are documented in the Python
Library Reference [3], while most of the modules are documented in the
Global Modules [4] document.  It's huge, but if you want to know what
Python has, it's almost always in there.

If you have a question, look for the solution by Googling this
newsgroup or the web in general.  If you still can't find a solution,
ask around in here.  Give plenty of detail, such the exact error
messages if one occurred, and the minimum amount of working code that
causes or demonstrates the problem.

You may get twenty different answers sometimes (like for your question
here), but that's twenty answers or perspectives that you may not have
known before you asked.

  --Jason

[1] http://www.diveintopython.org/
[2] http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide
[3] http://docs.python.org/lib/lib.html
[4] http://docs.python.org/modindex.html