Programming Python, 3rd Edition

The Task

Imagine, if you will, that you need to keep track of information about people for some reason; maybe you want to store an address book on your computer, or perhaps you need to keep track of employees in a small business. For whatever reason, you want to write a program that keeps track of details about these people. In other words, you want to keep records in a database—to permanently store lists of people’s attributes on your computer.

Naturally, there are off-the-shelf programs for managing databases like these. By writing a program for this task yourself, however, you’ll have complete control over its operation; you can add code for special cases and behaviors that precoded software may not have anticipated. You won’t have to install and learn to use yet another database product. And you won’t be at the mercy of a software vendor to fix bugs or add new features. You decide to write a Python program to manage your people.