A quote from the article: "Install this bad boy with the simple command sudo apt-get install python ..."

Two things:

1. Fedora and related distribution users will want to say "yum -y install python" instead.

2. But it's hard to imagine a distribution that doesn't have Python installed by default, because so many Linux system utilities are written in Python.

Another quote: "Alternatively, you can just start hacking away and use StackOverflow to fill in any of the gaps in your knowledge."

Yes, good suggestion, but there's always the searchable online Python documentation:

http://www.python.org/doc/

And if you're offline for any amount of time, the documentation can be downloaded:

http://docs.python.org/download.html (2.x)

http://docs.python.org/py3k/download.html (3.x)

Python has some amazing libraries -- even symbolic algebra (what Mathematica does):

    from sympy import *
    x,a,b,c = var('x a b c')

    pprint(solve(a * x**2 + b * x + c,x), use_unicode=False)

The result:

             _____________   /       _____________\
            /           2    |      /           2 |
     -b + \/  -4*a*c + b    -\b + \/  -4*a*c + b  /
    [---------------------, -----------------------]
              2*a                     2*a

The Unicode output is, of course, much nicer:

http://i.imgur.com/fR7qO.png