Python is a high-level, interpreted, interactive, and object-oriented scripting language. It can be used as both a scripting language and for object-oriented programming. Python code is automatically compiled to byte code and executed. It supports data types like numbers, strings, lists, tuples, dictionaries, booleans, and sets. Common operations include concatenation, slicing, repetition, indexing, and more. User input can be obtained using functions like input() and raw_input().