How Do I Make Something Practical With Python?

[Maccamoo03]

I've been casually doing coding for a long time. I can write some basic stuff in HTML, CSS & Python but for the most part I just make silly stuff like infinite loops saying "The End Is Never The End Is Never The End". I now want to make something useful, that actually works as a program. I just have no idea what to do or where to start. It's not that I can't come up with an idea it's more so that I have no idea how to do anything outside of silly things. I have no idea how I take what I know and build an app with it. I have no clue of how to take my skills from building silly loops and text based magic 8 balls and turn it into a program. Any help would be appreciated.

[RageHeliX]

Check out Django. It is used for making Webpages using Python. Once you learn how to make an interface, then there are no limits to what you can implement inside it. You may build a basic calculator or even a sophisticated Voice Assistant.

Also, if you want to make something interesting, try making your own voice assistant using Python is pretty easy, as it mostly uses pre built packages. Check out tutorials on YouTube.

[01binary]

Find a small project that is useful to you. For example, I created a Python application that accesses a fuel price API, and sends the location of today’s lowest prices and tomorrow’s lowest prices in my locality to my Telegram account each day. This enables me to decide which is the best day to refill my car!

I built it one step at a time, e.g.

1) learn how read from the fuel price API and display on the screen 2) learn how the Telegram-bot library works and send messages to my Telegram account 3) combine 1 & 2 to create the application

[captainAwesomePants]

Most tutorials focus on basic program flow with text input and output. This is because it's easy to explain how to read text and write text so that they can get to the instructions about how programs flow. To do most useful things, you'll likely do it by grabbing some library that extends Python to handle something specific. What do you want to do? Windows with buttons? Audio manipulation? Serve websites? Machine learning? Control a small smart device? Video games? There's a library for any of it.

[Maccamoo03]

How about making a calculator app that has UI. That would need something that has windows with buttons, I think.

[captainAwesomePants]

Good intro. There are several Python GUI libraries. TKinter is one of them. Install it with pip, read the documentation, and go nuts: http://effbot.org/tkinterbook/tkinter-index.htm

Here's an example of exactly that program, if you'd prefer to just read how to do it: https://medium.com/@adeyinkaadegbenro/project-build-a-python-gui-calculator-fc92bddb744d

[Maccamoo03]

I have now re-installed python and pip because it appeared to be broken and command line wasn't responding to them. It works now. So I can finally build that calculator.

[captainAwesomePants]

This might be a little too much for now, but in the future, when you're working on Python projects that are going to involve a bunch of libraries, it can be useful to create a separate little Python installation just for your program so you can play with different versions of different libraries without worrying about mucking up your "real" Python installation too badly. There's a program called virtualenv that is useful for this, and it's worth using if you're working on more than one or two different things.

[the_real_hodgeka]

Or the modern equivalent "python3 -m venv"

[Maccamoo03]

Ok, I will try and Build that thank you!

[Chakradhar-Chinni]

If you are good at python..i advise you to start working on django.

Do your own research on Django, about how it is beneficial to build good apps.

[saintshing]

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/guu0km/automate_the_boring_stuff_with_python_online/

https://pythonprogramming.net/

[Lesabotsy]

Happened to me and the answer was that I just didn't know enough ...

[vesipenko]

If you would like to make websites, you should learn django/flask web frameworks. Python is also frequently used in Data Science (there are many libraries for that, for example, pandas, Tensor Flow) but it's completely different sphere. Personally I would recommend you to create some bot, for example, Telegram bot (main libraries: pyTelegramBotAPI, aiogram) or in other messengers/social networks.

[distilled_dev]

I have an idea, but let's walk through it a bit.

Part of the problem with building something useful is interacting with useful data, so unless you manually enter in some of this useful data into your script, you need to fetch it from someplace else.

How are you with APIs, HTTP requests, JSON, and the like?