Book Image

Learn Programming in Python with Cody Jackson

By : Cody Jackson
Book Image

Learn Programming in Python with Cody Jackson

By: Cody Jackson

Overview of this book

Python is a cross-platform language used by organizations such as Google and NASA. It lets you work quickly and efficiently, allowing you to concentrate on your work rather than the language. Based on his personal experiences when learning to program, Learn Programming in Python with Cody Jackson provides a hands-on introduction to computer programming utilizing one of the most readable programming languages–Python. It aims to educate readers regarding software development as well as help experienced developers become familiar with the Python language, utilizing real-world lessons to help readers understand programming concepts quickly and easily. The book starts with the basics of programming, and describes Python syntax while developing the skills to make complete programs. In the first part of the book, readers will be going through all the concepts with short and easy-to-understand code samples that will prepare them for the comprehensive application built in parts 2 and 3. The second part of the book will explore topics such as application requirements, building the application, testing, and documentation. It is here that you will get a solid understanding of building an end-to-end application in Python. The next part will show you how to complete your applications by converting text-based simulation into an interactive, graphical user interface, using a desktop GUI framework. After reading the book, you will be confident in developing a complete application in Python, from program design to documentation to deployment.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Writing tests

Python has a number of different testing libraries available. The default library that comes with Python is unittest. This library is based on JUnit, from Java, and it shows. In this my opinion, the library is not especially user friendly, and there are 12 different tests to choose from, based on the expected outcome of the code. Writing the tests isn't especially intuitive for beginners, partly because of the amount of boilerplate code required just to work with unittest.

While nose2 is available as a third-party testing library, a more popular option is pytest. It requires no boilerplate; most of the time, just having pytest installed on your system is sufficient, though, in some cases, an explicit import of pytest is required. Tests are written as you would write normal Python code; the assert keyword tells the testing framework what the expected outcome...