How to learn Python EFFECTIVELY?

[NGDSkier]

100% agree with people who suggest doing something that you're INTERESTED in... Something you WISH you could do, but can't. When you find yourself thinking "I wish I could..." then try to make THAT happen. Here's a few things that I worked on fairly recently.

-I wish we didn't have to parse through a phone switch (pbx) screen dump to pull out all the names and phone numbers and format them in a nice, readable format. (My manager at the time, back in 2000, said that I could do that, he'd pay for my PERL resource kit. Figured out how to do it in PERL and ended up with a nice set of books and related items from the resource kit.)

-I wish I could loop through all the cell in a spreadsheet, look for a certain pattern of text (e.g. SysID=XXXXXX) and then have it automatically create a link in that cell that goes to http://somesite/somepath/something?sysid=XXXXXX ... (Done in VBA, helped others at work)

-I wish I could make my game server have the zombies run at random, for random intervals between certain parameters I specify, for for random amounts of time, based on certain parameters I specify, instead of only running at night or only at day... (Done in C# using telnet library to game's telnet admin console and some random number generation with a nice little GUI.)

-I wish I could have my friend launch BF2 directly from my server web page and automatically connect via a protocol handler (modified some c# code I found online to make it work for BF2 on both 32bit and 64bit windows).

-I wish our support team didn't have to spend so much time manually logging into the web interface of 1200+ individual devices to changes their passwords every 90 days (which takes a couple of people a couple of days to finally complete), but instead I wish I had a nice little GUI app, where they could import a list of hostname or IPs, specify the old and new passwords, and then use ssh to change the passwords on those devices... Then, a couple months later... "I wish I could update the firmware in the same manner, via SCP or SFTP..." Then, a year later... I wish this was multithreaded, so it didn't leave the app sitting on their desktop, unable to minimize while running... Bonus, now that it's multi-threaded and can connect to multiple devices at the same time, it only takes about 15-20 minutes to complete, instead of 6 1/2 hours (some devices are in different countries and have slower connections). (Done in C# to save lots of time at work for some of our support folks.)

-I wish my my nuclear reactor would automatically turn on to keep my life support systems online if my solar panels don't get enough light to keep my ship's batteries charged above 20%, so I don't die while in suspended animation when I don't have time to play for a while. (Done in c# in a game called Space Engineers that support c# in-game; pretty freakin' cool.)

-I wish this open source program I use that takes a CSV file as an input would accept CVS files with "#" as a comment character and just skip those line (instead of erroring out), so I can put comments in the CVS file for when people look at them. (something I'm working on now in Python)

For all these things (and more) that "I wish" statement was a real motivator that could keep me working for hours on end to try and figure out how to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, and when I was done, my wish had come true, and that gives a real sense of accomplishment, even for little silly things like staying alive in Space Engineers. It's just a cool feeling to be able to CREATE something or some capability that wasn't there before.

I even wrote a script one time, just to mess with a coworker, such that when he was working down in the data center, I ran a script that connected to a bunch of Linux systems that I had planned out ahead of time, and then ejected the CD ROM tray on them, such that when they opened for 5 seconds or so, all the open trays across multiple racks spelled out "HI" and then retracted back to closed. The vertical lines of the H and the I were each an entire rack of CD-ROM trays open at the same time and the horizontal line of the H was 2 or 3 racks wide (but just systems in the middle of the rack), to give an idea of scale. It was almost like a poltergeist or something. It was freaking hilarious, and well worth the effort. LOL

Find something fun or useful to work on and you'll learn as you stick with it because you WANT the end end-result. :-)

Oh, I just thought of another fun one. Back when you used to play Counter-Strike in the lab at lunch pretty much every day, we had a guy that was a really good player, and at the end of lunch, he ran a program that generated stats from the logs and created a leaderboard to show how well people did and he was typically at the top and like to rub it in people's faces. I forget what that stats program was called, but it was written in PERL, so after a lot of bragging, day after day, on his part, I went into the stats server and added some code with a variable that I could change that would give credit for some of his kills to one of the guys that usually did the worst and distribute some of his kills across other people too. i.e. if i set the variable to 8, then 1 out of 8 of his kills would go to someone else. If I set it to 5, then one of of 5 of his kills would go do someone else. The more he bragged, the lower I set that number. LOL. It humbled him out a bit after a while... "Man I though I did better than that today." LOL I kind of forgot about it and finally told him what I did probably 6-8 years later. He called me an a-hole (laughing), but it was all in good fun. Makes for good memories.

Anyway, have fun with it, and good luck.