What this book covers

Chapter 1, Implementing the Weather Application, guides you through developing a terminal application that shows the current weather for a specific region and a forecast for the next 5 days. This chapter will introduce you to the basic concepts of Python programming. You will learn how to parse command-line arguments to add more interactivity to programs, and you will finally see how to scrape data from websites using the popular Beautiful Soup framework.

Chapter 2, Creating a Remote-Control Application with Spotify, will teach you how to perform authentication with the Spotify API using OAuth. We will use the curses library to make the application more interesting and user-friendly.

Chapter 3, Casting Votes on Twitter, will teach you how to use the Tkinter library to create beautiful user interfaces using Python. We will use Reactive Extensions for Python to detect when a vote has been made in the backend, after which, we will publish the changes in the user interface.

Chapter 4, Exchange Rates and the Currency Conversion Tool, will enable you to implement a currency converter that will get foreign exchange rates in real time from different sources and use the data to perform currency conversion. We will develop an API that contains helper functions to perform the conversions. To start with, we will use opensource foreign exchange rates and a currency conversion API (http://fixer.io/).
The second part of the chapter will teach you how to create a command-line application makes use of our API to fetch data from the data sources and also get the currency conversion results with a few parameters.

Chapter 5, Building a Web Messenger with Microservices, will teach you how to use Nameko, a microservice framework for Python. You will also learn how to make dependency providers for external resources such as Redis. This chapter will also touch upon integration testing Nameko services and basic AJAX requests to an API.

Chapter 6, Extending TempMessenger with a User Authentication Microservice, will build upon your app from Chapter 5, Building a Web Messenger with Microservices. You will create a user authentication microservice that stores users in a Postgres database. Using Bcrypt, you will also learn how to store passwords in a database securely. This chapter also covers creating a Flask web interface and how to utilize cookies to store web session data. By the end of these chapters, you will be well equipped to create scalable and cohesive microservices.

Chapter 7, Online Video Game Store with Django, will enable you to create an online video game store. It will contain features such as browsing video games by category, performing searches using different criteria, viewing detailed information about each game, and finally adding games to a shopping cart and placing an order. Here, you will learn about Django 2.0, the administration UI, the Django data model, and much more.

Chapter 8, Order Microservice, will help you build a microservice that will be responsible for receiving orders from the web application that we developed in the previous chapter. The order microservice also provides other features such as the ability to update the status of orders and provide order information using different criteria.

Chapter 9, Notification Serverless Application, will teach you about Serverless functions architecture and how to build a notification service using Flask and deploy the final application to AWS Lambda using the great project Zappa. You will also learn how to integrate the web application that was developed in Chapter 7, Online Video Game Store with Django, and the order microservice developed in Chapter 8, Order Microservice, with the serverless notification application.