In this chapter, we covered some of the fundamental Python programming concepts that you'll need to understand before you can write effective geoprocessing scripts. We began the chapter with an overview of the IDLE development environment to write and debug Python scripts. You learned how to create a new script, edit existing scripts, check for syntax errors, and execute scripts. We also covered the basic language constructs, including importing modules, creating and assigning variables, if/else statements, looping statements, and the various data-types including strings, numbers, Booleans, lists, dictionaries, and objects. You also learned how to read and write text files.