beginner

[Kyrophis]

absolutely a beginner here, I have heard a lot of great things about python and I have a very simply objective (or so I think) and would like some recommendations on the right path from those most familiar.
backstory - we have a device at work that requires telnet communication in order to configure it, the API guide has a lot of simple on/off commands and requires you to set the IP address and type of interface. Instead of searching through the API guide and potentially missing a setting or two, I would like to build a GUI for this thing that allows for easy configuration and would prefer a good foundation to start with.

putty command example for setting the ip address

Set ipaddress xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
set ipgateway xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
set ipmask xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

Theres a "get statusall" command as well that i would like to print the output but understand that is a bit more intuitive, i would just settle for just the easy config.

[Larz60+]

Python 3.6.5 without a doubt. To install, follow these tutorials (I recommend not to do it any other way, as these tutorials are complete and correct, except perhaps python version number (currently 3.6.5)):
python 3.6 install here
for simple GUI you can use tkinter
If you are going to be using more comples GUI window (and it appears that may be possible) I would recommend wxpython (phoenix) or Qt5 (pyqt5).
For your serial communications, you can use pyserial.

once you have python installed, you can install packages using pip