Chapter 1. Developing Simple Applications

Python is one of the most widely used dynamic programming languages. It supports a rich set of packages, GUI libraries, and web frameworks that enable you to build efficient cross-platform applications. It is an ideal language for rapid application development. Such fast-paced development often comes with its own baggage that could bring down the overall quality, performance, and extensibility of the code. This book will show you ways to handle such situations and help you develop better Python applications. The key concepts will be explained with the help of command-line applications, which will be progressively improved in subsequent chapters.

This chapter will be an introductory one. It will serve as a refresher to Python programming. That being said, it is expected you have some knowledge of Python language, as well as object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts.

Here is how this chapter is organized:

• We will start with installation prerequisites and set up a proper environment for Python development.
• To set the tone right for the rest of the book, the next section will be a brief introduction to the high fantasy theme of the book.
• What follows next is our first program. It is a simple text-based fantasy game, presented as a Python script.
• We will add some complexity to this game and develop an incremental version of the game using simple functions.
• Moving ahead, we will add more features to the game and redesign the code by applying OOP concepts.
• The last topic will briefly cover Abstract Base Classes (ABCs) in Python.

The code explanation will be a bit verbose. More experienced readers can breeze past the examples and go to the next chapter, but be sure to understand the theme of the book and review the code in the ch01_ex03.py file. In the next few chapters, you will learn techniques to progressively improve this code.