In this chapter, we will explore the first concepts related to clean code, starting with what it is and what it means. The main point of the chapter is to understand that clean code is not just a nice thing to have or a luxury in software projects. It's a necessity. Without quality code, the project will face the perils of failing due to an accumulated technical debt.

Along the same lines, but going into a bit more detail, are the concepts of formatting and documenting the code. This also might sound like a superfluous requirement or task, but again, we will discover that it plays a fundamental role in keeping the code base maintainable and workable.

We will analyze the importance of adopting a good coding guideline for this project. Realizing that maintaining the code align to the reference is a continuous task, and we will see how we can get help from automated tools that will ease our work. For this reason, we quickly discuss how to configure the main tools so that they automatically run on the project as part of the build.

After reading this chapter, you will have an idea of what clean code is, why it is important, why formatting and documenting the code are crucial tasks, and how to automate this process. From this, you should acquire the mindset for quickly organizing the structure of a new project, aiming for good code quality.

After reading this chapter, you will have learned the following:

• That clean code really means something far more important than formatting in software construction
• That even so, having a standard formatting is a key component to have in a software project, for the sake of its maintainability
• How to make the code self-documenting by using the features that Python provides
• How to configure tools to help arrange the layout of the code in a consistent way so that team members can focus on the essence of the problem