VS Code is invaluable for Python development and experimentation. VS Code—not to be confused with Visual Studio, which is a commercial product—is a sophisticated, completely free, and open source text editor created by Microsoft. It is language-agnostic and will work perfectly with Python, JavaScript, Java, or any other language. VS Code has hundreds of built-in features and thousands of great plugins to expand its capabilities.

In order to install VS Code, head to its main web page, https://code.visualstudio.com/, and download the package for your OS. The installation is pretty straightforward; there is no need to change any of the default settings. Assuming you installed VS Code as part of the previous steps, you now need to open the VS Code application. Next, switch to the plugin marketplace menu (as shown in the following screenshot), type Python, and install the plugin. Python binding for VS Code provides plenty of Python-specific features and will prove very useful for us throughout the book.

In the following screenshot, 1 represents the plugin marketplace. Once switched, type Python in the search form (2), select the plugin (3), and hit install (Python was already installed in this screenshot, hence it offers to uninstall it instead):

Once that's done, let's briefly review the interface of the tool.