Book Image

Modular Programming with Python

By : Erik Westra
Book Image

Modular Programming with Python

By: Erik Westra

Overview of this book

Python has evolved over the years and has become the primary choice of developers in various fields. The purpose of this book is to help readers develop readable, reliable, and maintainable programs in Python. Starting with an introduction to the concept of modules and packages, this book shows how you can use these building blocks to organize a complex program into logical parts and make sure those parts are working correctly together. Using clearly written, real-world examples, this book demonstrates how you can use modular techniques to build better programs. A number of common modular programming patterns are covered, including divide-and-conquer, abstraction, encapsulation, wrappers and extensibility. You will also learn how to test your modules and packages, how to prepare your code for sharing with other people, and how to publish your modules and packages on GitHub and the Python Package Index so that other people can use them. Finally, you will learn how to use modular design techniques to be a more effective programmer.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Modular Programming with Python
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Redesigning Charter


As the Charter library now needs to optionally save the chart as a vector-format PDF file, we need to find an alternative to the Python Imaging Library that supports writing to PDF files. There is one obvious candidate for this: ReportLab.

ReportLab is a commercial PDF generator, which is also released under an open source license. You can find out more about the ReportLab toolkit at http://www.reportlab.com/opensource/. The easiest way to install ReportLab is to use pip install reportlab. If this doesn't work for you, check out the installation instructions at https://bitbucket.org/rptlab/reportlab for more details. Documentation for the ReportLab toolkit can be found at http://www.reportlab.com/docs/reportlab-userguide.pdf.

In many ways, ReportLab works in the same way as the Python Imaging Library: you initialize a document (called a canvas in ReportLab), call various methods to draw the elements onto the canvas, and then use the save() method to save the PDF file to...