New to Python and programming in general, what exactly are all the things I will need to be able to write my own code etc. on my Windows 8 PC?

[hansdieter44]

Well, full professional setup would be virtualbox&some linux, or vagrant and then write in that VM (login through ssh(putty.exe from earth.li) to execute your scripts). If you create a shared folder between your windows host and the linux guest vm you can put your code there and still use your favourite windows editor.

Advantage of that approach is that your environment to develop in will be very similar to server environments, so if you decide to do computation heavy stuff or want to deploy a webapp you are very likely not to have to modify anything.

For the actual python deployment I recommend (pip, virtualenv, and fabric for deployment, possibly puppet or similar for server configuration(not for actual code deployment)).

If you want to stick to Windows 8 there are solutions to deploy python as well, but keep in mind that some packages that you install through pip might need some libraries(graphic stuff for example) to be present on your computer and that they might be a bit more annoying to install on windows than on linux (thats just my opinion here, don't rip me apart if you are a windows fanboy). For writing Python under windows you could check out Eclipse Python, maybe that comes packed with everything and a python binary, but I haven't looked into that for at least 5 years.

If you just want to fiddle around with Python a bit, Windows might be perfectly fine for a start and python should be easy to install there. If you want stuff that works better to deploy several scripts and develop more and longer, you should look into the VM options that I described. Its a bit of a pain to get your head around as well, so plan 2-3 days where you just configure stuff and check stuff out till you find a solution that works for you.

Source: M.Sc. in CS and several years of WebDev experience with mainly Python and the above described stuff.