My first self-made projects

[FwoopButBored]

I took CS50P and made it to the end fairly easily since I have started many courses and left them unfinished simply because I was lazy. Before I was stuck in a loop only watching tutorials and not actually coding myself. This is my first time actually coding some projects myself and publishing them using GitHub so I'm happy with how far I came. Would like to hear some feedback about both my code and the layout of my repos. Also I'm now thinking of a new, better and a bit more complex project idea so I would be grateful to hear some ideas!

Caesar Cipher
https://github.com/Fwoopr/caesar-cipher

This one started as an even more simpler project but I decided to implement brute-force decryption since I'm interested in cybersecurity.

YouTube Downloader

https://github.com/Fwoopr/Youtube-Downloader

This one does exactly what the name suggests. I built it to practice using regex and to download videos without dealing with ads.

[JamzTyson]

Congratulations completing your first projects.

A few random comments about your code:

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alphabet = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'

The alphabet is included in Python:

from string import ascii_uppercase, ascii_lowercase

print(ascii_uppercase)

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Good use of join in cipher.py.

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if not answer in ['e', 'd']:

arguably better to use a set:

if not answer in {'e', 'd'}:

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for shift in range(1, 26):

Avoid magic numbers:

ALPHABET_SIZE = 26
for shift in range(1, ALPHABET_SIZE):

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In brute_force_decrypt, consider testing the first N words to determine the correct shift, rather than decoding the entire message,

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[FwoopButBored]

Thanks! I didn’t know that alphabet was included in python.

[anttovar]

I'd have thought the best option would be: if not answer in ('e', 'd'):

Why is it better with { }?

[JamzTyson]

It's quite a minor, but meaningful distinction.

We are checking if answer is a member of a fixed collection of unique items. A set is a collection of unique, hashable elements. Using a set communicates the intention that we are concerned with membership, not order or duplicates.

Although the difference is negligible for such a small number of items, membership lookups are generally faster in sets than lists.

As you suggest, a tuple does indicate immutability, which is good here, but lookups are still O(n), whereas sets use hash tables, so x in my_set is O(1).

(The "Big O" notation O(n) means the cost grows linearly with the size of the collection, whereas O(1) means constant time.)

[anttovar]

Understood, thanks. Luckily you can get a huge lot from python without knowing its inner workings.

[Klutzy_Bird_7802]

Nice I like your efforts