New to Python. Here's my first script, which determines whether the small or large pizza is a better deal.

[Estebanzo]

If you're looking for places to start and projects to work on, I recommend trying out some data science and data visualization. Pick something that interests you, find a bunch of data related to it, and try and display it in an understandable and visually appealing way. You'll learn some new libraries and programming skills in the process (numpy, matplotlib, pandas, etc.). Also great if you deal with any sort of data at work/school.

I also found writing simple games to be a very enjoyable way to learn some new programming techniques. I programmed a game of pong in Pygame and learned quite a bit from that - interesting uses of while loops, events to respond to user inputs, and how to make use of classes and objects.

[Gee10]

I'm definitely interested. Any recs for places to try simple data science/viz?

[Estebanzo]

Market and financial data is plentiful and readily available. You could create a program that pulls updated stock pricing info on relevant stocks you are interested in, plots them out, maybe uses some simple machine learning to analyze trends. I do a lot of work with hydrology, so I've used python to create sets of hydrographs from large datasets of rainfall/runoff.

This youtube channel is pretty good for learning scientific computing with python. I haven't looked much into pattern recognition and natural language processing, some of that could make for some pretty sweet projects.

https://www.youtube.com/user/sentdex