Mark Hammond - Python Programming On Win32 : Help for Windows Programmers

This part covers the basics about the language and the platform andshould be read by everyone not familiar with using Python on Windows.

This is a Python primer: what its good for, whos usingit for what, and where to get hold of it. If you want to brief yourmanager on Python, show her this chapter!

This chapter is a high-speed minitutorial; it should at least enableyou to follow the code examples. We dont aim to teach Pythonfrom scratch, but instead point you to the right places for moredetailed tutorials.

Here we cover how Python is set up on Windows and review some of theWindows-specific packages and extensions.

covers PythonWin and IDLE, twointegrated development environments for Python, each complete withsyntax coloring, object browsers, and debuggers.

Here we introduce Pythons support for COM, Microsoftskey integration technology.

This part is an in-depth exploration of what you can do with a Pythonapplication on Windows. Advanced refers to thecapabilities Python gives to your programs, not to the level ofprogramming difficulty. Although the focus is on COM, it brings manyfeatures of the language together. In some cases, we use features notfully explained until later chapters; we want to make you sayWow, so you can do that, ratherthan Wow, so that ' s how you do it: wesave that revelation for the last section. The project is to developan extensible accounting toolkit in Python. , isintended to be read straight through.

This chapter explains the business requirements of our applicationand develops a Python class library that encapsulates the basic rulesfollowed by accounting systems. For people new to Python, thisprovides a more in-depth set of examples of object-orientedprogramming with Python.

Here we show how to build a COM server that exposes our Pythonengine to other applications, building a fairlystandard user interface in Visual Basic on top of our application. Inthe process, we cover how to move data of all types back and forthbetween Python and other languages using COM.

Next we show how to expose the Python interpreter to end users. Ourapplication allows users to work with a command prompt, writescripts, and even define new event handlers and graphical views,thereby making the application extensible. Python makes thiscapability, normally found only in large commercial applications,childs play.