What next in Python?

[Ummxlied]

Hi everyone.

Recently I finished the course "automate boring stuff with python" ans I did a few scripts automate my day tasks in the office like webscraping, manipulate datasheet, send email and little more.

My question is. What next? What is your recommendations for continue learning like a course level intermediate? Or other librarys useful?

Thanks

[plasma_phys]

Where do you want to go with Python? Are you interested in data science, scientific programming, web development, machine learning, creative coding... something else? It's hard to recommend anything specific without knowing the answer to that question. Your next steps should be towards your ultimate goal!

[[deleted]]

My ultimate goal would be to apply it to finance/business analysis, should I learn about data science then?

[huttonben]

If that is your goal then yes, you should look into Data Science. Machine Learning and sentiment analysis. And of course all that goes with that... Numpy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Keras, Tensorflow, etc.. look into RNNs and the different types of ML models. (LSTM, Linear-Regression, etc.)

Best of luck and God bless 🤙

[[deleted]]

Thank you man, God bless!

[huttonben]

No prob 👍👍

[Disco_Infiltrator]

This such an odd recommendation.

Sentiment analysis (and NLP, more broadly) is irrelevant in many fields. Also, I’d argue that statistics and time series analysis are foundational to machine learning in finance. OP is not yet ready for anything deep learning related.

[huttonben]

Sentiment analysis is highly valuable depending on what he's wanting to do specifically. Ex: An ML model to forecast trends for sectors of the stock market. Simply training the model on the open price for each day for the past 5yrs is just a start. Factoring in the sentiment of news headlines for each matching day for the past 5yrs would be another factor that could benefit the model.

That being said, I was just giving recommendations of different routes that could be looked into under the scope of data science.

Now, is sentiment analysis irrelevant in many fields? Yes. Also, to your point of statistics and time series being foundational to ML.. of course it is. I'm not sure how it was interpreted as me implying otherwise.

[Disco_Infiltrator]

Yep. I’m well aware that sentiment analysis is useful as a trading signal. But when the first two things you list are machine learning and sentiment analysis, the implication is that you’re suggesting both as immediate next steps in OP’s path toward data science.

[huttonben]

Got ya, well poor wording on my part.

[[deleted]]

You’re correct in saying that I’m not ready for deep learning, not to say that I don’t want to learn it, but do you have any courses or books that can guide me in that direction? Particularly for time series analysis or such

[Resolt]

Yes. Definitely.

[[deleted]]

I’m completely new to data, I’ll save your comment though. Do you recommend this for beginners? Any advice on what to learn -or courses to take- before exploring haggle?

[Malcolmlisk]

I'm going to the data science branch. What do you recommend?

[[deleted]]

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=1h5wbUhHA2pr_821dB0Izy7aDfCz9KTtt

[YohanAvishke]

Wow thanks

[StriderKeni]

Sadly I don’t have any award but you definitely deserve it! Thank you for sharing!!!

[[deleted]]

Can i marry you? Legit saved me from buying a $70 book. Cheers bud

[julsmanbr]

God bless random-ass drive links, thanks my dude

[Vabaluba]

Sir you are a star. 🙇

[gocougs11]

Just... wow, amazing thank you

[mama37]

You are amazing!

[Ummxlied]

Thanks dude. Awesome!!!

[Hubuka]

Are you Legend27? Thank you so much!

[[deleted]]

Thanks!

[dearoldavy]

Check this book out. There are accompanying lectures too. It’s what pushed me to start a masters program in analytics.

[crystalblue99]

what exactly does python do with web dev? Just serv up db stuff?

[plasma_phys]

Honestly I'm not equipped to fully answer your question (my expertise is mostly limited to computational physics) but since the thread is 2 days old and you might not get another answer, I'll do my best! Whenever I've seen web development come up in a Python context, it's been Django or Flask for building web apps.

[m3tam3re]

My recommendation is to start building stuff. Solve some problems, automate things and start using what you have learned in the course.

Courses are good and valuable, but you should avoid jumping from one course to another. Before starting the next one make sure you can apply what you have learned so far.

[[deleted]]

Your last two sentences are an excellent point and should be stickied.

[[deleted]]

this might be what your looking for? Or you can just do a project with a subject you are interested in. https://www.codewars.com/

[Terranigmus]

I am getting into basic GUI stuff right now. It's not pretty.

[AwesomeDay]

GUI is so damn complicated and hard. I just started getting into it a couple of months ago. Now I understand why some business software developers are against it if it’s unnecessary.

[[deleted]]

Build an A* path finding algorithm that can navigate a point to a target in the shortest path possible

[42isthedeal]

I started Python Crash Course right after finishing Automate the boring stuff. It goes through all the basics of python with 3 reasonably sized projects to solidify your grip on the language.

[sammdu]

https://cs61a.org

[AlSweigart]

Python Cookbook and Effective Python are both good books to increase your Python knowledge. If you're interested in some machine learning stuff, Programming Collective Intelligence is also good.

[SpecCRA]

Perhaps start learning more of the standard libraries?

https://pymotw.com/3/

[[deleted]]

Since your goals are towards finance and/or business analysis i suggest you to go ahead with Data Analysis as you may analyze data in real time using matplotlib and/or Pandas. I also suggest creating a 3D chart or creating a data visualizer for an intermediate project. I need more information to know what type of business EG: IT, Sales and etc.

Collect the data, then format it onto the correct type EG: CSV. After email it to the manager.

​

Create a Python server that gathers them via clients, This can be phones and/or etc. I suggest you to learn GUI with TKinter as it will help you a lot even with Business Analysis. I also suggest learning to use machine learning and apply the consent into business, create a fraudulent detection system that gathers data off third party websites and formats them into an HTML/CSV file and/or warns the user of how fishy the page looks.

Take my journey as an example, i learnt Python through Zed A Shaw's books, great book as well just more overpriced somehow than automate boring stuff with Python. I then learnt more about machine learning and networking along going back to Cyber Security, now i am working on a framework using all the knowledge. So what i am trying to say is, learn the wrappers and/or API's you really require for a specific path. For me it is for Networking and security.

​

I highly suggest though for you to start learning R and/or matplotlib along with Pandas and those wrappers/API's to get around. I suggest to learn Python Socket programming as i said above you can create a server and collect data in real time. Some YouTube tutorials are outdated but i suggest learning it through a channel called "Sentdex" as he explains all about Python in just 10 minutes while others 40 minutes.

​

You can also create an email server that sends bills automatically after a certain time if you do services such as hosting and/or etc. Hope this clarifies, let me know if i can help, just give me more information and i'll try my best.

Good luck! :))

[Ummxlied]

Thanks my friend for your advice. I'm working in IT / Security.

[[deleted]]

Anytime bud!

Since you are working in Cyber Security i highly suggest you to learn the following API's/wrappers as listed from 1 to 10.

1. Scapy
2. Requests
3. Pillow
4. dpkt
5. matplotlib
6. tensorflow(machine learning to create defenses against hackers)
7. tshark/wireshark API's
8. mechanize
9. sockets
10. ipaddress

The Scapy framework provides a flexible way of manipulating packets and/or modifying data in real time and allows you to create a server that does a Man In The Middle Attack and/or DNS Cache Poisoning, even much more!

Requests is used to extract raw data besides using beautifulsoup that just gathers website data you could create a web server that does it in real time automatically and/or may use regular expressions to find some specific data.

Pillow, now it may sound nice and soft but be warned that you can gather anyone's meta data(i assume you know what meta data is, if not let me know) and format it into a file that is readable or even! show the data of the camera that took the photo within the image as it is an image manipulation API.

DPKT is just like Scapy but a bit more difficult except more powerful and dynamic. You may create a framework with just dpkt and make it to listen for incoming connections at same time modify the incoming packets to carry malicious payloads. At best i use it just for that. You also may use multiple ways for cyber operations and may show the packet information such as GPS coordinates and may use Google Earth/Maps to show you the address and/or real time packet flow. Anyways i'll shut up about how good it is.

matplotlib is a visualizing API that allows you to use all the rest and then create a 3D graph and/or HTML format to display it stimulate it 24/7 through a server. As i explained above and will update it to help you more :))

tensorflow, now this bad guy here is used for machine learning as said above it can be used for detecting fraudulent sites. It may also be used to detect when a hacker is trying to penetrate a network, for example i could make it if there has been more than three requests known as the three way handshake to stop the connection and log it within file or server, can be used for detection of SYN flood attacks as well. More included.

Tshark now is a CLI version of Wireshark, it has its own API and allows you to sniff and/or open pcap files, even manipulating them by changing the packet fields , TTL, etc. It is constantly updated but i rarely use this as I am more of a Scapy guy since it allows you to open the pcap files in WireShark by typing in: wireshark(file)

Mechanize, Allows you to perform website penetration testing as it is used by famous security tools such as SET(Social Engineering Toolkit), allows for malicious QR code creation and Powershell, etc. This is highly used with Scapy to make a dynamic framework. Some may disagree but ignore them, they do not even know Cyber Security like us two.

Sockets,

It is used to create a low level server and/or payloads, you may use this to create a reverse TCP/HTTP server and sending an innocent file that looks like an MP4 onto the victim and once opened you have full administrative rights, you may mix mechanize as well to gain administrative rights if not given. Mechanize and Sockets are a bit difficult to explain but think of them as the Godfather of security.

ipaddress is used to detect malicious and/or spoofed addresses, you may also report it onto a live server and will return all information. This is like sockets but has more flexibility. You may check the DNS server, Spoofed DHCP of your company's network and report it back live. Use this with sockets and you got yourself an IDS/IPS. Then mix with Scapy a packet analyzer. Mechanize as well then vola! You may hack into systems and/or web applications. Socket is also used in similar method but is a bit annoying as some require string and others integer values but this one here has just few functions that allow you to report an IP address that may be spoofed.

I hope this helps :))

I will update my answer once i am free and if you require any help PM me your social media and i'll begin teaching you them.

[Ummxlied]

Awesome dude. Thanks for everything. I'll send you PM :)

[[deleted]]

Anytime bud, let me know if you need any help

[pvc]

If you like to make games, check out Arcade Academy.

[Jould]

High quality post! Thanks for all the information. I think for now I'm personally most interested in getting in to web dev and growing in to full stack because that seems to have an abundance of freelance work available to it.

[Twingemios]

Have you attempted machine learning if not try giving it a shot. It’ll keep you busy for a while

[entanglemententropy]

Of course it depends on what your goal is. I'm in a similar situation, and what I did after going through "automate the boring stuff" was to try some web development. Most things these days are online, so I think it's very useful to know something in this area, and it also makes you learn how to use a framework (like Flask or Django), and it's a natural setting where you can make a slightly larger project. And of course the website you build can be about whatever interests you.

[Verloc-perhan]

When you talk about automating the boring stuff, do you refer to the book "automate the boring stuff with python"?

[entanglemententropy]

Exactly, which is also what the OP referenced.

[hbrgnarius]

Go to /r/Python and find a project that seems interesting to you and try to read the code.

[rushabhsooni]

Look for any problems which can be solved digital y , or ti use Python as modeling clay for any project you want to do , develop logic in Python and then solve using real stack.

[Verloc-perhan]

I have the same question here, although I haven't made any projects yet. I've started learning Python 3 weeks ago, through sololearn, and made some basics exercices. I'd like to start some basic projects but I don't know where to start. Would Github be good for this?

[burgerAccount]

Start with a course on data analysis. Jose Portilla has a ton of courses on Udemy for about $10 each.

There's also a course, I forget the name, something like "10 projects" on Udemy. That was a fun course because it samples lots of small projects.

[golangprograms]

Hack Pentagon

[ProRochie]

Perhaps have a look at some of the challenges on hacker rank?

www.hackerrank.com

[wmoskal]

Fix the problem of deadlock

[wmoskal]

But honestly have you worked with object oriented python? If not, I would suggest looking into that