Conventions

This book uses a variety of text styles to 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 look up the class in the dictionary and store it in a variable named PropertyClass."

A block of code is set as follows:

    def add_property(self):
        property_type = get_valid_input(
                "What type of property? ",
                ("house", "apartment")).lower()
        payment_type = get_valid_input(
                "What payment type? ",
                ("purchase", "rental")).lower()

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

    def add_property(self):
 property_type = get_valid_input(
                "What type of property? ",
                ("house", "apartment")).lower()
 payment_type = get_valid_input(
                "What payment type? ",
                ("purchase", "rental")).lower()

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

>>> c1 = Contact("John A", "johna@example.net")
>>> c2 = Contact("John B", "johnb@example.net")
>>> c3 = Contact("Jenna C", "jennac@example.net")
>>> [c.name for c in Contact.all_contacts.search('John')]
['John A', 'John B']

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: "It will fail with a not enough arguments error similar to the one we received earlier when we forgot the self argument."