We will be using Python 3.4 in this book. Most of the techniques will work on Python 2.6+ as well, but some small changes may be required to the examples presented in this book in order to make them run. The Appendix B, Working with Older Python Versions lists these changes.
This book assumes that the reader has an intermediate level of Python understanding. In this book, we will be using Python language features such as lambdas, decorators, generators, and properties, and we assume that the reader is familiar with them. While we will give a brief description of these features as we encounter them, this book will not go into a lot of details about how they work, choosing instead to focus on how to test such code.
Note
Note that if you have only Python 2.x installed on your system, then go to http://python.org and download the latest release in the Python 3.4 series. For Linux users, if Python 3.4 is not installed on your system, then check your distribution's package repository to get the latest version. If no package exists, or you are using a non-standard or older version of a distribution, then you might have to compile it from source. The instructions to do so are available at https://docs.python.org/devguide/setup.html.
Since TDD is a hands-on coding activity, this book will use a lot of code snippets throughout. We recommend that you follow along by typing the code and running it yourself. It is much easier to understand the code and concepts when you can see it working (or not working) in front of you, rather than just reading through the code in this book.
Tip
Getting the code
You can download the example code files from your account at http://www.packtpub.com for all the Packt Publishing books you have purchased. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.
All the code in this book can be found online at https://github.com/siddhi/test_driven_python. You can select a specific branch of the repository to get the code for the start of this chapter, and work through this chapter from that starting point. You can also select a tag on the branch to get the code for the endpoint of this chapter, if you would prefer to jump to the end of the code.