"In order to get the most out of this course, there are a few things you're going to need." "First of all, you need a basic understanding of programming." "This means that you need experience writing working code in a modern programming language, for example, Perl, PHP, Java, JavaScript, C++, or any modern programming language, and you need some understanding of object-oriented programming." "You don't necessarily need to be an expert, but you need to at least have an understanding of what it is, and why it is." "You will need to have a text editor." "A text editor is not a word processor." "When you edit text using a word processor, the word processor adds other information to the file, information about formatting, layout, fonts, things like these." "These things will make the program not work." "You cannot edit program code in a word processor." "You need a plain text text editor and there are lots of them available on every platform." "For the purposes of this course, we're going to be using an integrated development environment called Eclipse for our text editor." "You do not need to use Eclipse." "Use whatever text editor you're comfortable with." "Use whatever coding environment you're comfortable with." "The reason that I'm using Eclipse in this course is for the purposes of instruction." "It runs on every platform and it allows me to demonstrate running the code in the same environment." "You don't need to use an integrated environment like that." "You can use a plain text editor." "Finally, you'll need a system with Python 3 installed, and I strongly recommend" "Python 3.1 or later." "The examples in this course are using Python 3.1." "Python 3 is a significant upgrade from Python 2." "Code written in Python 2 will not necessarily work in Python 3, and vice versa." "It's essentially the same language, but there are some significant differences, and this course is about Python 3." "Python 3 is easy to get and to install." "Installers are available for most operating systems, and you can find an installer for your operating system at this URL."