cover

Introduction

This book tries to achieve only one thing:

Show you a project go from nothing to OK.

By nothing I mean, no code at all. Not even a fleshed idea of what it does. No goals, no commitments. Just a vague interest.

And by OK I mean it will work, it will have tests, it will be available to use, it will be useful and be a real thing.

Think of it as a sort of documentary on the beginnings of a rock band, only instead of rockers there is a single overweight Argentinian dev, and instead of a band there is a piece of software.

So, not much like a documentary on the beginnings of a rock band.

Target Audience

To get the most benefit from this book I expect the reader to have a basic knowledge of the Python programming language. Knowing and understanding the contents of the official Python Tutorial. should be enough to be able to follow all the code in the book, which has been kept as simple as possible.

Readers with deeper knowledge of the language or more extensive programming experience may still benefit from it but will find a lot of the first part boring.

Requirements

You can try to follow the book by just reading it but that is probably not the best idea. Actually running the example code is educational. Modifying it even more so.

So, you will need a working python interpreter. The examples have only been tested on Linux. I suppose before calling this book "finished" I will have to make them work on Windows and/or OS X somehow.

Each one of the larger parts of the book requires a separate development environment and has a "Chapter 0" about setting it up.

How the book is built

Conventions

This is a book mostly about code, so how the code is shown is important.

If a function, variable or some other thing is mentioned in the text it will be displayed in monospaced font, like this: function_name.

Most of the time, code will be shown in blocks, which can be just a fragment of code that is not part of our program:

1def dummy():
2    foo()
3    bar()

If it's a single line, it will have no line numbers:

print(dummy())

If the code is part of a file which is shipped as an example, then it will have a title telling you the file name (which links to the file) and the line numbers will match those of the file. For example, this block shows lines 25 to 28 of a file called boxes.py:

25    def __repr__(self):
26        return 'Box(%s, %s, %s, %s, "%s")' % (
27            self.x, self.y, self.w, self.y, self.letter
28        )

All source code is formatted using black for consistency, and at a width of 72 columns, so it fits in a printed page.

Similar to, but not exactly like code blocks are the ones showing simple preformatted text:

This is preformatted, but it's not actually code.

Those are often used to show the output of a program.

When showing how to run a program, it will show a $ prompt, and the command itself will be in bold, while the output of the program will be regular text:

1$ python code/lesson3/boxes.py pride-and-prejudice.txt lesson3.svg
2
3Creating a svg file.

When explaining a series of steps on a UI, they will be separated by "▶". For example:

Go to the file menu ▶ click "Open." ▶ Choose your file

License

Creative Commons License
Boxes: Your second python book by Roberto Alsina is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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