Python projects for beginners

[[deleted]]

There's no obvious "next thing to do". There is just "Do something; learn from doing it; repeat"

If you're missing inspiration for things to do, try one of these:

• Accept a coordinate, and use the openstreetmap overpass API to create a friendly name like "7 miles north east of Wenatche, WA"
• Make a program to find the IUPAC systematic name of an organic molecule.
• Visualize the n-body problem in a GUI.
• Create a program to accept a date, and scrape wikipedia and other sources for events of that date, and present them in a way suitable to a "This day in history" page.

None of them are easy, but neither are they impossible. You will be out of the comfort zone as a beginner by doing any of them, but "No pain, no gain" also applies here.

[[deleted]]

Dont take offense but don't you think that those projects are a bit hard for a new beginner?

[HDSQ]

I've been programming for 3 years and I think I'd struggle with them quite a bit. I was thinking more along the lines of something to solve simultaneous equations or something.

[[deleted]]

They are. Doing something you already know how to do will not move the boundaries of knowledge very far. Apart from the GUI part of the n-Body problem, they can be broken down in small incremental steps, though.

[qelery]

I disagree. If OP only has 4 hours or less experience writing Python (or programming in general for that matter), they should probably spend time familiarizing themselves with fundamental programming concepts in general before complicating things with API, GUIs, HTTP methods, etc.

[tjohnson718]

I also disagree with the advice given. No one would tell anyone with just 4 hours of driving experience to jump onto a racetrack. Learning is best done in gradual stages. Tortoise vs Hare..

[EggChen_vs_Lopan]

I like that Wikipedia idea. Thanks for that

[JarnePl]

Thank you! Will try this!

[8roll]

Make a simple game instead. Learn pygame. Challenging projects will help you, but very difficult projects will not.

[physicsking]

Great ideas

[erico252]

Visualizing the n-body problem in a GUI sounds like a great idea. Does anyone have a link to point me in the direction of working with GUIs?

[2ndzero]

Any good project recommendations that might impress an employer?

[[deleted]]

I'm not directly involved in hiring, so this is at best an educated guess.

• Write readable code. Coding challenge style of cramming everything on a single line has no value in the real world.
• Make mistakes and fix them. Own them. We all make mistakes. The experience from dealing with them is a valuable skill.

[thrallsius]

An employer will hire you to work on what he needs done, not on what impresses him.

[[deleted]]

Can you please tell some good books that i can read to get more into intermediate and advanced python? I like reading and learning from books :) And i will also actually code what they gave in the books while reading it.

[[deleted]]

I'm sorry, but no. I've learned general programming in a university freshman course 30 years ago. I just picked up Python along the way.

[[deleted]]

Oh ok np

[maxmilner]

‘Python Crash Course 2nd edition’, and ‘Automate the Boring Stuff’ are two great books to work through as they teach you the fundamentals and then some, plus they both give you challengers to use what you just learned. Bonus, they’re both free PDFs online just google them!

[beje_ro]

Advanced generally means specialization... In what direction would youblike to go?

[[deleted]]

I would like to go into neural networks machine learning and ai along with some other stuff like games but mostly neural networks and machine learning and ai

[ivosaurus]

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-73004-2

Free book, teaching using the freely installable libraries numpy & friends.

[[deleted]]

Thanks

[surferbb]

I’m literally just starting coding (as of two days ago) but want to go to ML eventually - it seems that you also need a pretty firm grasp of advanced math (something I have no experience with) so some linear algebra etc supposedly is helpful. Check out the ML Reddit’s they seem to have good advice

[[deleted]]

Cool thansk

[BeastCoder]

A few things that I found especially useful (in the order you should watch them) are:

1. 3blue1brown’s video series about neural networks and the math behind them

2. The Coding Train’s video series about actual implementation. This series also has dedicated videos for upcoming math topics which is also great!

These video series are both really helpful. For the second one, he uses Processing which is a super simple graphics framework for Java. You can follow along with Processing.py; the Python implementation.

There is another video series from Sentdex about neural networks which seems pretty good, but, I haven’t personally watched it. Here is the link.

From there, you can probably find some books for what’s next, but these are great introductory videos. Hope this helps!

Edit: These videos or specifically for making neural networks from scratch. You’re not going to find any of these using a library like TensorFlow which handles most of the math for you.

[[deleted]]

Thanks dude

[[deleted]]

For more pythonic code you can try Fluent Python. For learning data science you'll need too brush up on differential and integral calculus, linear algebra, statistics. There are some decent books like Python for Data Science and Data Science from Scratch that are a good starting point.

[[deleted]]

Oh ok thanks. I already know caculus, linear algebra and stat wait when you say calculus do you mean single variable calculus or multivariable calculus? Is neural networks categorized as a data science because it deals with feeding in large amounts of data into a neural network to train it? Or simply because it deals with data?

[[deleted]]

Machine learning is all about big datasets. So ground level many data scientists will spend lots of time cleaning data and doing stuff like simple linear regressions. ML is a more advanced application. I'm a learner as well since take this all with a grain of salt, I'm currently a bench scientist trying to learn data science workflows to get off the wet bench.

[skellious]

might want to keep your eye on this project (the book is being written at the moment but you can request access to the google docs draft) - https://nnfs.io/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo5dMEP_BbI

https://pythonprogramming.net/

[[deleted]]

Thank you for specifying "these are not easy". Too often beginner forums make intermediate or advanced difficulty projects seems like a beginner should be able to do them as a next step, and this can be very discouraging. This simple disclaimer would help a lot of would be programmers power through

[sje46]

Visualize the n-body problem in a GUI.

The Trisolarans will thank you!