[Pythonmac-SIG] warning: newbie ahead

[Paul Archibald]

Greeting Comrades,

I am a (Mac) C++/Java programmer looking to expand myself into  
Python. I have been working through some tutorials, which has made me  
want more, but I am having trouble understanding how to organize and  
manage the project files that I write or otherwise obtain.

What I am looking for is how to manage my PDE (Python Development  
Environment) and project file so that I can write real programs,  
saving, loading and executing, importing modules and calling  
functions from various modules that I have written or otherwise  
obtained. I have grabbed some code from various places on the web,  
but I don't know where to put the files so that I an use them, except  
for opening them in the editor and executing them, which is nice but  
does not let me build real programs.

So, if you are building a program, where do you keep your sourcecode  
for that progam, and how does Python know how to find it, and how do  
you "link" modules together to make bigger programs?

There is a little info on configuration in the Mac Modules tutorial,  
but it I still have some problems with .py scripts that seem to  
execute okay but from which I cannot import any methods.

I am using IDLE w/Python 2.5, which does not have the "set scripts  
folder" command like MacPython 2.4.

Sorry this is a newbie question, but heck, I'm  newbie! And I work  
alone, so I have nobody to ask or even look over the shoulder of to  
see how its all set up.

Thanks,
Paul