How to download and use python on ubuntu? [closed]

Question

I recently purchased a system 76 laptop, this is my first exposure to the ubuntu os. Terminal says that I currently have version 2.7.5+(im not sure what the plus means).

My first question is how do I actually use python on this computer since it does not come with idle and my second question is how do I download the newest version 3.3.4 which can be found here: http://python.org/download/releases/3.3.4/ ?

Answer 1

To begin, open a console window.

To install Python 3:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install python3.3

To install IDLE:

sudo apt-get install idle3

Keep in mind that you can also open a terminal window and simply type python to be thrown into a python console. Python 3 may need to be forced with python3 if apt as decided not to overwrite your system's default 2.7.5 install.

There are also other environments similar to IDLE that can be a lot nicer to use. One such example is a plugin for the Sublime Text text editor called SublimeREPL (A REPL is a Read Evaluate Print Loop - essentially the interactive python prompt). These REPLs are available for many interpreted languages and can be very handy to have close by when you're writing code.

Here's what it looks like on my OSX install: