Python resources

If you want to learn more about using Python on your own, here are a few good resources and tips.

Start a project

My main tip: start a personal project that is fun / meaningful / useful to you. If you have completed this class, you know enough to be dangerous - you know the basics of what’s possible, you know some of the terminology, and you know how to use Google and other resources to look things up. The easiest way to continue learning is to start a project that you are personally invested in - if you’re interested in spending time working on the project, you will be motivated to research and learn in order to make the project work.

If you’re not sure what kind of project you might want to work on, here are some basic ideas:

• Something relating to your other classes or to your daily life that you could use a technological solution for - for example, remember the flashcard program we built in the first half of the semester?
• Create a game, or re-create a favorite game
• Make a tool that helps you track something about your life
• Do something interesting with existing data (baseball stats? Location data? Book or movie data? Pokemon data? There are APIs out there for a lot of different kinds of data!)

Resources for learning more

• Reddit, particularly the subreddit r/learnpython - this is a great place to ask questions / get advice
• roadmap.sh - really solid resource for learning all sorts of things about programming. There is a Python-specific roadmap here as well.
• Corey Schafer has an excellent set of YouTube videos about various Python topics

There are tons and tons of other resources out there - books, websites, etc - Google is your friend here. But really the best way to learn is to work on a project and create programs that actually do something. You can read all you want, but the way you actually learn how to code is through practicing it. So take the time to practice!

More courses

The MI department has a number of programming-specific courses, mostly focused on web design and game design. Here are a few that I recommend as next steps:

• MI 231 - Game and Interactive Media Development
• MI 320 - Reasoning with Data
• MI 349 - Web Design and Development

These courses are all offered at least once every year.