Applications are becoming more and more sophisticated as languages such as Python open the doors to the world of programming for people who have the creative vision but always felt actually writing code was beyond their grasp.

A large part of any programs success is based on how well it can react to the events which it has been programmed to understand and listen for.

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A good example of an event would be when the user clicks a button on the applications window. What happens when that button is clicked?

Well, the first thing that happens is the operating system sends out a message to let any listening software know that the button was clicked. Next, your application needs to do something in response to that event.

But what should it do?

Well, that is down to you. As your skills grow you will realize that your software needs to be able to make decisions on its own.

Just like the button click scenario, if your application hasn’t been programmed to perform a specific action then it won’t. It is down to you, the programmer, to give the application a specific set of instructions which should be followed if a button is clicked.

Take a look at the following code and then I will explain what it all means:

buttonClick = “yes”
 if buttonClick == “yes”:
 print “The button was clicked”
 else:
 print “The button was not clicked”

The above code introduces the if-else conditional statements. I will explain what the code its self does first before going into more detail about the statements.

On line one we create a variable called buttonClick and assign it the value of “yes”.

Then starting on line two we enter an if-else conditional block which essentially checks if our buttonClick variable holds the string “yes”, and if it does it will print out the string on line 3.

In this particular case it is obvious that our variable does hold the correct value so after our success message has been printed to the screen the program will skip the remaining else statement.

If we changed the value of our variable to ‘no’ then the else statement would be executed and our failure message would be displayed.

If you try out the above code you will begin to understand just how import conditional constructs, such as the if-else clause, can be incredibly useful for checking if some event, or in the case of our code, if a variable holds a particular value.

Realistically you can’t create a good piece of software, not even something as simple as a calculator, without the use of conditional statements. They arm you with a means to give your code a way to react and respond in a more sophisticated and intelligent way.

When we take a look at loops in a future tutorial you will learn how you can use these statements to check multiple values for the correct one before the application will continue executing the rest of the code.