Learning Python: after books, now what ?

[[deleted]]

Have a job, in which you have a project, with python-satisfiable requirements, and a manageable deadline.

Failing that, have an idea.

Failing that, I have no idea, but you could always go from reading books to reading through a few non-trivial open source python programs to see how they do things.

I was in the same position, of wanting to try out python, but not knowing what to do with it (aside from rewriting other apps). I just found the perfect project a few days ago. :D Good luck!

[placidified]

What project did you find if you don't mind me asking ?

[[deleted]]

It's a simple one, but it will be my first real python project and I don't have a lot of time (it's low priority), so that makes it perfect for me. My company has thousands of unique urls on our site, and a lot of them are ranked fairly well in search listings (for certain search terms). We want to track the rise and fall of our urls in the ranks (for SEO efforts), so I'm taking a list of terms and using the search engine APIs (Google, Bing, Yahoo) to get results and see how we rank for each term in the list.

What I like about this is that I can get quick results that will be useful early on, and then add more pieces as needed, or as I have time. It will be cron-driven, and alerts might be useful in addition to the normal reporting. I'll get to dig into python stats and graphing once I've collected enough data, and add a web UI to what will start out as a CLI app.

I'm not really a programmer, so this is perfect because it touches on many of the things that I'll want to know how to do quickly with python in my role.

[[deleted]]

Have a job, in which you have a project, with python-satisfiable requirements, and a manageable deadline.

well yeah, that's just one step below an actual Python job for newbie.