I was gonna dip my feet into the pool as well and one of the first places I stumbled was steem piston. https://pypi.python.org/pypi/steem-piston/0.2.
It is a command line tool to interface with the blockchain. I have not used this yet so I cannot vouch for it, but it seems to be the goto solution for most developers. Tell me what you discover, because soon I too will be coding for the blockchain!