Programming Python, 3rd Edition

2.1. "Programming Python: The Short Story" If you are like most people, when you pick up a book as large as this one, you'd like to know a little about what you're going to be learning before you roll up your sleeves. That's what this chapter is f...

2.2. The Task Imagine, if you will, that you need to keep track of information about people for some reason; maybe you want to store an address book on your computer, or perhaps you need to keep track of employees in a small business. For whatever...

2.3. Step 1: Representing Records If we're going to store records in a database, the first step is probably deciding what those records will look like. There are a variety of ways to represent information about people in the Python language. ...

2.4. Step 2: Storing Records Persistently So far, we've settled on a dictionary-based representation for our database of records, and we've reviewed some Python data structure concepts along the way. As mentioned, though, the o...

2.5. Step 3: Stepping Up to OOP Let's step back for a moment and consider how far we've come. At this point, we've created a database of records: the shelve, as well as per-record pickle file approaches of the prior section suffice for basic ...

2.6. Step 4: Adding Console Interaction So far, our database program consists of class instances stored in a shelve file, as coded in the preceding section. It's sufficient as a storage medium, but it requires us to run scripts from the command li...

2.7. Step 5: Adding a GUI The console-based interface approach of the preceding section works, and it may be sufficient for some users assuming that they are comfortable with typing commands in a console window. With just a little extra work, thou...

2.8. Step 6: Adding a Web Interface GUI interfaces are easier to use than command lines and are often all we need to simplify access to data. By making our database available on the Web, we can open it up to even wider use. Anyone with Int...

2.9. The End of the Demo And that concludes our sneak preview demo of Python in action. We've explored data representation, OOP, object persistence, GUIs, and web site basics. We haven't studied any of these topics in any sort of depth. Hopefully,...