What you need for this book

You will need a copy of Autodesk Maya 2013 for this book. Newer versions are fine, and older versions that use Python 2.6 (2011, 2012) should be acceptable as well. Any operating system capable of running Maya (Windows, OS X, Linux) should work, though you will need to translate things such as file paths to what is appropriate on your system.

I would also suggest having an install of Python 2.6 or 2.7 outside Maya for exploring and running some of the samples that can be run from the interactive interpreter prompt. You can download Python 2.6 or 2.7 from http://www.python.org/download, or it may be installed on your Mac or Linux OS already!

Finally, I strongly suggest installing both a powerful text editor and an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Python is a real programming language, and you should use the powerful tools available. If you are an experienced Python user already happy with vim, I don't expect to convert you. But if you are a converted MEL scripter playing around in Notepad, it is time to embrace your good fortune!

For a text editor, Sublime Text (http://www.sublimetext.com) is popular, cross-platform, and free to use on an unlimited trial. Notepad++ (http://notepad-plus-plus.org) is excellent if you are on Windows and prefer free and open source. There are dozens of other good text editors, and if the two editors mentioned here do not tickle your fancy, you should keep trying until you find one that does.

Finally, the choice of IDE is usually a contentious topic. For Python, however, I can confidently say PyCharm (http://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/) by JetBrains is the premiere IDE, and my personal favorite. It has a free and quite powerful Community Edition as well. Other popular options are Wing IDE (http://www.wingware.com) and Eclipse with PyDev (http://pydev.org). Experiment with a few different programs, but whatever you do, move past IDLE, the IDE bundled with Python!