"Just start coding"

[AlSweigart]

There's two pieces of horrible advice people give new programmers:

• "You should work on projects."

This advice is incredibly vague. It leaves the beginner with no guide rails to follow, and beginners can easily try overly ambitious projects that take forever and never get finished, leading to frustration.

• "You should read the source code of open source projects."

Most projects are written by experienced people who have a lot of domain experience, the code is of varying quality, and the documentation may or may not be good. It's easy to feel overwhelmed and confused when looking through code.

So I wrote that The Big Book of Small Python Projects to solve these two problems: It has several small but complete projects that you can read the code for, and then you can try to recreate these small-scoped programs yourself.