If you are new to Python, we're recommending that you install the Anaconda distribution on your computer. But if you already are up and running and happy with some other Python install, that's fine too, but you will want to make sure that astropy is installed (Anaconda installs/updates astropy automatically)..
Here
is
the general documentation for the various packages included in
Anaconda.
And for writing/debugging python code, many of you use jupyter
notebooks, which work fine. I have also found using
the Spyder
environment
to be helpful.
Getting help
First of all,
try python inline help. For example, help on the scatter command
can be obtained by saying help(plt.scatter) (presuming
you've already loaded the pyplot package, i.e. import
matplotlib.pyplot as plt)