The Raspberry Pi is one of the smallest and most affordable single board computers that has taken over the world of hobby electronics and programming, and the Python programming language makes this the perfect platform to start coding with.
Getting Started with Python and Raspberry Pi will guide you through the process of designing, implementing, and debugging your own Python applications to run on the Raspberry Pi and will help you interact with some of its unique hardware.
Chapter 1, Your First Steps with Python on the Pi, introduces the Python development tools as you install and set them up on the Raspberry Pi after installing the Raspbian operating system.
Chapter 2, Understanding Control Flow and Data Types, introduces you to the control flow and conditional execution operations. Also, the basic data types and the operations that can be performed on them will be covered in this chapter.
Chapter 3, Working with Data Structures and I/O, gives you an overview of the standard Python data structures (for example, list, dict, and tuple) and how they can be used within an application. Also, this chapter will provide an introduction to reading and writing files on the Raspberry Pi's filesystem, including reading from the sysfs to get data such as the current temperature of the processor.
Chapter 4, Understanding Object-oriented Programming and Threading, introduces the concept of object-oriented programming and compares it to the functional programming that has been done up to this point in this book.
Chapter 5, Packaging Code with setuptools, introduces you to the setup tools in the Python package, which are used to package Python applications and libraries for easier installation. This will also include an introduction to the pip utility and PyPi package repository.
Chapter 6, Accessing the GPIO Pins, gives you an overview of the Python library for accessing the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi and a brief introduction to some basic electronics needed for the tutorials in the chapter.
Chapter 7, Using the Camera Module, covers using the picamera Python library to interact with the camera module, the options that can be configured using the library, and writing a simple application to record a section of video in several different modes.
Chapter 8, Extracting Data from the Internet, covers the use of several libraries (including requests and urllib2) to connect to webservers and request data, and will include obtaining weather forecasts from an online API. Also, you will be introduced to several third-party libraries that access data from specific sources.
Chapter 9, Creating Command-line Interfaces, covers interaction with applications via the command line using the argparse Python module.
Chapter 10, Debugging Applications with PDB and Log Files, introduces you to the PDB (Python debugger) tool, discusses how it can be used to diagnose and fix issues in Python programs, and covers how the logging Python module can be used to capture information from an application to be used later for debugging. This includes a tutorial in which code with several issues placed into it will be debugged and corrected.
Chapter 11, Designing Your GUI with Qt, provides an introduction to GUI design with Qt using Qt Designer and the Python Qt package.
This book is designed for those who are unfamiliar with the art of Python development and want to get to know their way around the language and the many additional libraries that allow you to get a full application up and running in no time.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
flan = "495" flan type(flan) flan_i = int(flan) flan_i type(flan_i)
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
sudo python setup.py install
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Next we will disable the LineEdit widget that will be used for displaying the result of a unit conversion, this is done by selecting the widget and removing the tick in the enabled property in the Property Editor as shown in the following screenshot."
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