Getting started with Python using Algorand - Day 1: set up environment installing SDKs

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Introduction

What Basics Should I learn First?

PYTHON PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE

.... to write a good program, you should be able to interpret a line of code.

How To Check If Python Is Installed On Your Computer

2. Now open your VSCode executable (.exe) and launch. The page should look like in the image below.

At this point, you need to configure your VSCode to get the best of the functionalities. As I mentioned earlier, this article does not cover how to set up VSCode but please refer here for instructions on how to set it up.

3. On the top left-hand corner, click on file, then select open folder. A dialogue box is opened and you should navigate into the folder we earlier created pythonTutorial and select it. then it is opened in VSCode.

4. Hover over the folder name on the left pane and create a file name it example.py. Ensure it has the python extension py. That way, python knows we want to write python code and when we run it is recognized.

Type the following codes in the

• We created a variable called userName and assigned a value to it. A variable is a reserved memory location to store value(s). It serves as a placeholder for a specific value that we hope to use later in the future.

• The value is a function of what we expect to get from the user via the input which is a keyword embedded in python.

Note that you cannot use words that are tagged "keyword" as variable created by you since they are reserved words. Example of keywords in python are:

input
function
print
string
int etc.

Refer to python reference document on the Python official website

• The opening and closing parentheses ( )immediately after the "input" are meant to take inputs or parameters from external objects for use within the function.
  If you do not understand this, don't worry as they may look like gibberish to you but you will grab it better as we proceed.

Anytime you see parentheses in front of a keyword or functions we defined ourselves, it means that such function is expected to collect arguments or parameters to be used as input on which certain computations will bee performed.

• In this regard, the input() is a function is python module that collects data externally, performed computation internally and return the output of the computation to us. It actually doesn't do much other than getting what we expect from the user and return the result to us. So, in this case we need to get the name of the user.

• Afterwards, the user entered his name(the expected value), and hit "enter" key, we need a placeholder for this value which is why we have created a variable called userName to hold this value for us.
  

  userName = input("Please enter your name.")

• We also printed the value we got from the user to our console using the line o code

• This type of data is called String virtually in all programming language. So whenever python sees these quotes, it treats anything within it as a string. Even if you place arbitrary amount of numbers between the quotes, python will always treat it as a string.

• The + sign is used as a way of joining multiple data that are of different types together. Note that the "Welcome" is a string data type and userNamecould be any type either a string or integer which should be specified at the point we asked user for the information. Don't worry if you don't understand what integer is. I will expatiate better in upcoming article.

• Lastly, you would notice an unusual manner at which I wrote the userName. This is a practice called camelCase. It is used to connect two or more words that we intended to use as a variable. We could have a variable we intend to give name as last digit for instance. Separating the words with space makes python throw an error because it sees it as two different words.

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I will close my keyboard at this point. you may go over the article as many time as can make you understand. Meanwhile I have designed it to give you the best learning experience if you're the text type. If you find this article useful, be kind enough to give a thumb and leave comment where you seem lost.