ython rimer python has become the programming language of choice for many researchers and practitioners in data science and machine learning this appendix gives brief introduction to the language as the language is under constant development and each year many new packages are being releasedwe do not pretend to be exhaustive in this introduction insteadwe hope to provide enough information for novices to get started with this beautiful and carefully thought-out language getting started the main website for python is where you will find documentationa tutorialbeginnersguidessoftware examplesand so on it is important to note that there are two incompatible "branchesof pythoncalled python and python further development of the language will involve only python and in this appendix (and indeed the rest of the bookwe only consider python as there are many interdependent packages that are frequently used with python installationit is convenient to install distribution -for instancethe anaconda python distributionavailable from the anaconda installer automatically installs the most important packages and also provides convenient interactive development environment (ide)called spyder use the anaconda navigator to launch spyderjupyter notebookinstall and update packagesor open command-line terminal to get started try out the python statements in the input boxes that follow you can either type these statements at the ipython command prompt or run them as (very short we assume that you have installed all the necessary files and have launched spyder anaconda