Code as a Liberal Art, Spring 2021

Unit 1, Exercise 2 lesson — Wednesday, January 26

Preparing for this lesson

  1. Text editor. Before class, make sure to download and install the Atom text editor onto your computer, freely available from atom.io.

  2. Python. If you have a Mac computer or a computer that runs Linux, it will have Python already installed and ready to do. If you have Windows, you will likely need to install Python. This guide on docs.python.org should have all the information you need to get that installed. If you are running Windows, please email me so we can make sure your system is setup and ready for you to use.

  3. Command line. We will be using the command line throughout the semester. If you would like to learn about what the command line is and how it came to be, you can watch this video about the history of the command line (25 min) that I made last semester. This was made for my "Radical Software" class, so please ignore that on the title slide. I also refer to a twitter project, which we won't be doing in this class.

    Make sure you can access the command line on your computer. On Mac, the easiest way is with a program called Terminal. Open up Finder, go into the "Applications" folder, look for a folder called "Utilities", and within that, find and double-click on "Terminal". Or you can use a Spotlight search (⌘-SPACE) and search for Terminal. When you open that, it should look like this:

    but with different colors. You can customize your colors in Preferences.

    On Windows, again, please reach out to me and we can work together to get you setup.

  4. Python image library (Pillow). For the first unit we will be working with a Python library for maniupulating images called "Pillow". It gets its name because it is based on a prior project called PIL (Python Image Library). PIL was abandoned about 10 years ago, but some other developers continued supporting a compatible project, and the name is a reference to the original.

    To install this library on your system, open Terminal and type the following command: 

    pip install pillow
    If you get a message that states something like Successfully installed pillow-8.1.0 then you are ready to go.