I have worked with Python in some IoT projects that I have played with before and have been interested in learning more ever since.
One of my latest tasks at work was to go through and edit a book filled with Python tutorials.
The book is designed to introduce you to a great online IDE called Repl.it by guiding you through all kinds of Python projects like plotting, web apps, chatbots, and machine learning programs to name a few. And my job was to do every single tutorial.
How cool is it that I get to play with Python projects and call it my job?
Starting off with getting used to the Repl.it interface and leaning how the basics of building apps on the platform works, I was amazed at how quick and easy it was to get started. Previously, it has always taken me at least a few hours to only set up the environment. With Repl.it, you simply start coding immediately, its like the arrival of the electronic calculator only for code.
Apart from how quick and easy it has become to write and run a program, working through the projects and realizing what can be achieved with just a few lines of code has changed my perspective completely, but that’s a topic for another time.
The first few tutorials show you how to use the interface and all its features. Then you continue to a few basic Python apps that you might have seen before, ie. print('Hello World'). Yes, the book would not be complete without the famous 'Hello World' project but the tutorials quickly become more advanced. You then do some data-science with plots and graphs and even pull your code from GitHub.
By the middle of the book, I ran into a PyGame project. This was a really fun one, juggling balls to see how long you can keep them all in the air. The code was also pretty fun to work with as it was all new to me, in fact, the whole second half of the book was a first. Creating GUI's, building web applications with Django and Flask, CRM applications with databases, web scraping, machine learning, and algorithms, all things I have never seen before.
I learn through doing and find it hard sometimes to grasp concepts just by reading about it without practical experience. These tutorials however explain each line of code very well and make it easy to follow along. The tutorials are all designed to lay down foundations of more complex projects and enable you to expand on them and make them your own.
Working through this book has broadened my knowledge of programming greatly, but most importantly it has given me a new perspective and advanced my coding journey to where I can now start building my own apps.
If you have started learning Python and are looking for some cool projects to build, I would highly recommend this free book. It will get you to build your own advanced apps in no time.
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