You will need the following software installed and working correctly on your system to be able to follow the course.
Common Issues & Tips
If you are having issues installing or running some of the tools below, check a list of common issues other course participants encountered and some useful tips for using the tools and working through the material.
Command Line Tool
You will need a command line tool (shell/console) in order to run Python scripts and version control your code with Git.
- On Windows, it is strongly recommended to use Git Bash (which is included in
Git For Windows package - see the Git installation section below). The use of
Windows command line tool
cmdis not suitable for the course. We also advise against using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) for this course as we do not provide instructions for troubleshooting any potential issues between WSL and PyCharm. - On macOS and Linux, you will already have a command line tool available on your system. You can use a command line tool such as Bash, or any other command line tool that has similar syntax to Bash, since none of the content of this course is specific to Bash. Note that starting with macOS Catalina, Macs will use Zsh (Z shell) as the default command line tool instead of Bash.
To test your command line tool, start it up and type:
$ date
If your command line program is working - it should return the current date and time similar to:
Wed 21 Apr 2021 11:38:19 BST