While using text editors is sufficient for writing python source codes, it is more convenient to use an integrated development environment (IDE) for software projects consisting of multiple source files. There are many operations such as testing, debugging, packaging, deploying, integrating, etc. that are part of software development. Code recommendation and error highlighting during source code writing phase are essentially time saving intelligent features provided by IDE applications.

As there are many benefits of using IDE platforms, we will be using PyCharm throughout this course, which also has an additional plugin named Teaching.Codes that you will use to study the course content, experiment with the examples, develop and submit your project assignments as well as midterm and final exam questions.