Screenshot first, writing later.

Entering these chapter notes is a huge chore, but I’m confident that it helps my understanding of and my retention to type them out. This chapter introduced drawing lines, rectangles, circles, arcs, fonts, and some other stuff…

This chapter introduced 2D graphics display and the GUI console, as well as a couple useful mnemonic devices, IDEA and ALTER, for framing your game projects. Plus new syntax, naturally.

Pygame

Pygame is a set of Python modules for the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL).

This chapter discusses if statements, while loops, functions, and variable scope. All using Python.

if Statement

An if statement evaluates whether an expression is true or false, and executes the immediate next indented block of code if it is true(in Python).

This post is pretty dry.

Data Types

Harris explains three different data types in Python; strings, integers, and floats; a string is text information, an integer is an integer, and a float is a decimal number.

I'm not going to record everything covered in the chapter, but here goes:

Installing Python

Python is an interpreted language, which means any machine running Python must have the engine installed--in other words, it doesn't produce stand-alone .exe executable files. Easily available from www.python.org.

A week before my spring break when I knew I wanted to pick up C++ again, I ordered a book off of Amazon. When it had not arrived the Thursday I was packing to leave, I sought any other primer on C++ from the MSU library. No luck. Finally, I tried some "game"- related keywords, and turned up this book written for Python programming.