Tools

This section briefly describes some tools that can be useful to start developing with Python. The tools presented hereiafter are somehow regrouped according to a couple of criteria.

Notebooks or scripts?

There are two main approaches to work with Python. One approach relies on editing some ASCII files, with the extention .py, that contain a series of instruction in the Python language. The istructions are interpreted in sequential order, as they appear in the file. These are the so called Python Scripts. Some lines can be skipped whenever marked as comments.

The other approach relies on the use of Python Notebooks: Python Notebooks are interactive web pages (because they can be opened with a web browser) that contains diverse kind of cell. There are two main types of cells: some cells contain Python code and plots; other cells can contain formatted instruction and descriptions of what is done in the code cells.

Both the approaches have advantages and disadvantages. Notebooks are great for demonstration purposes and for teaching. For more complex development task, where versioning and debugging are key factors, script can be a better solution.

Cloud based solutions

Google Colab

bla

Binder

Locally installed applications

Spyder

asdf

JupyterLabs and Jupyter Notebooks

asdf

Visual Studio Code

PyCharm

First of all, one can distinguish between tools made for working with Python Notebooks or Python Scripts (actually, some of the tools presented here allow to work with both Python Scripts and Python Notebooks).