Programming ArcGIS 10.1 with Python Cookbook

Chapter 1. Fundamentals of the Python Language for ArcGIS

Python supports many of the programming constructs found in other languages. In this chapter, we'll cover many of the basic language constructs found in Python. Initially, we'll cover how to create new Python scripts and edit existing scripts. From there, we'll delve into language features, such as adding comments to your code, creating and assigning data to variables, and built-in variable typing with Python, which makes coding with Python easy and compact.

Next, we'll look at the various built-in data-types that Python offers, such as strings, numbers, lists, and dictionaries. Classes and objects are a fundamental concept in object-oriented programming and in the Python language. We'll ...