Just a warning; I don't hate Python, but you could say it's not my cup of tea. I have used it and know it to a decent extent but it's generally not my language of choice. I'll still try and help though.
I don't know how one goes about making graphical stuff in Python, but I personally see it as more of a language for scripts rather than programs. I'm not saying it's a terrible choice but it might just not be a great one. That said pyglet looks pretty sweet so I could be completely wrong.
In general, I don't know of any particular paradigm or conventions when messing with binary data. Personally I just kinda open the files and read what I need to when I need to.
What I do suggest for programming anything, is to try separate stuff out into multiple functions/methods. For example say you have about 20 lines of code that I dunno, save an image object into a PNG file. That would be convenient to have in a function which you can then call from various places. You just call "saveImage", passing in the image and the output file name, and it'll handle the rest. You can separate the specifics of that task from your application's overall logic.
Apart from that I would just say take it slow. Hack stuff out, you can make ugly code as long as you know it's ugly, and then once you're comfortable with the library and understand how things work, you can try clean it up and make it more manageable. You're gonna have to experiment for a while before you know your way around reading/writing and working with binary stuff with your code (and displaying images with it) and can start make a proper program.
That's all I can think of at the moment. I love it when people give coding a go though, I would like to help where I can so don't feel afraid to ask for it. As I said Python isn't my forte though so I'm not sure how helpful I can be with language-specific questions.
I don't know how one goes about making graphical stuff in Python, but I personally see it as more of a language for scripts rather than programs. I'm not saying it's a terrible choice but it might just not be a great one. That said pyglet looks pretty sweet so I could be completely wrong.
In general, I don't know of any particular paradigm or conventions when messing with binary data. Personally I just kinda open the files and read what I need to when I need to.
What I do suggest for programming anything, is to try separate stuff out into multiple functions/methods. For example say you have about 20 lines of code that I dunno, save an image object into a PNG file. That would be convenient to have in a function which you can then call from various places. You just call "saveImage", passing in the image and the output file name, and it'll handle the rest. You can separate the specifics of that task from your application's overall logic.
Apart from that I would just say take it slow. Hack stuff out, you can make ugly code as long as you know it's ugly, and then once you're comfortable with the library and understand how things work, you can try clean it up and make it more manageable. You're gonna have to experiment for a while before you know your way around reading/writing and working with binary stuff with your code (and displaying images with it) and can start make a proper program.
That's all I can think of at the moment. I love it when people give coding a go though, I would like to help where I can so don't feel afraid to ask for it. As I said Python isn't my forte though so I'm not sure how helpful I can be with language-specific questions.