Intro to Python

Python is an object-oriented scripting language that was released publicly in 1991. It was developed by Guido van Rossum of the National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam.

Python has rapidly become one of the world’s most popular programming languages. It’s now particularly popular for educational and scientific computing, and it recently surpassed the programming language R as the most popular data-science programming language.

In this chapter, we introduce Python programming and present examples illustrating key language features that will be useful in our exploration of data science.