What you need for this book

To get the most out of this book, you'll need a copy of Maya and a programmer-friendly text editor. There are a great number of text editors out there, and many people have strong opinions on which they prefer. At a minimum, you'll want an editor that saves in plain text and offers the option to display line numbers. You'll also likely want an editor that offers syntax highlighting for Python.

All of the code for this book was written using Sublime Text (https://www.sublimetext.com/), an excellent and low-cost text editor that is great for Python, as well as many other tasks. You don't have to use that though; any text editor that allows you to edit plain text will work just fine.

Almost all of the examples in the book rely on nothing more than Python and Maya, but there is one example that uses PIL. To install PIL, you'll likely want to use PIP, a package manager that makes installing Python packages easy. You can get that at https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/.