This chapter and the next take a quick look at program execution—how you launch code, and how Python runs it. In this chapter, we’ll study how the Python interpreter executes programs in general. Chapter 3 will then show you how to get your own programs up and running.

Startup details are inherently platform-specific, and some of the material in these two chapters may not apply to the platform you work on, so more advanced readers should feel free to skip parts not relevant to their intended use. Likewise, readers who have used similar tools in the past and prefer to get to the meat of the language quickly may want to file some of these chapters away as “for future reference.” For the rest of us, let’s take a brief look at the way that Python will run our code, before we learn how to write it.