this book you don' have to run out and rent the meaning of life or the holy grail to do useful work in pythonof coursebut it can' hurt while "pythonturned out to be distinctive nameit has also had some interesting side effects for instancewhen the python newsgroupcomp lang pythoncame online in its first few weeks of activity were almost entirely taken up by people wanting to discuss topics from the tv show more recentlya special python supplement in the linux journal magazine featured photos of guido garbed in an obligatory "nice red uniform python' news list still receives an occasional post from fans of the show for instanceone early poster innocently offered to swap monty python scripts with other fans had he known the nature of the forumhe might have at least mentioned whether they were portable or not step stepping up to oop let' step back for moment and consider how far we've come at this pointwe've created database of recordsthe shelveas well as per-record pickle file approaches of the prior section suffice for basic data storage tasks as isour records are represented as simple dictionarieswhich provide easier-to-understand access to fields than do lists (by keyrather than by positiondictionarieshoweverstill have some limitations that may become more critical as our program grows over time for one thingthere is no central place for us to collect record processing logic extracting last names and giving raisesfor instancecan be accomplished with code like the followingimport shelve db shelve open('people-shelve'bob db['bob'bob['name'split()[- 'smithsue db['sue'sue['pay'* sue['pay' db['sue'sue db close(get bob' last name give sue raise this worksand it might suffice for some short programs but if we ever need to change the way last names and raises are implementedwe might have to update this kind of code in many places in our program in facteven finding all such magical code snippets could be challengehardcoding or cutting and pasting bits of logic redundantly like this in more than one place will almost always come back to haunt you eventually it would be better to somehow hide--that isencapsulate--such bits of code functions in module would allow us to implement such operations in single place and thus sneak preview