training for newbies

[Peter Scott]

> > do you know any sites with free programs for newbies, which will help me in
> > progress? i know that only way to develop is writing programs, but in my
> > book i don't have programs to write, only questions..
> 
> Check out http://www.uselesspython.com and Python Cookbook at
> http://aspn.activestate.com

I can't recommend the Python Cookbook enough. Get the book if you can
afford it. The discussions are great, giving you real understanding of
the things being discussed. There is a world of difference between
good python code and bad python code, and the python cookbook is a
great way to learn good python style: by example and discussion.

If you want programs to write, here are some ideas:

A web spider, which should support the robots exclusion protocol (see
the robotparser module in the standard library,
<http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-robotparser.html>). Try
extracting a list of images.

Something that takes an URL to an RSS file and spits out an HTML file.
You can also turn this into a CGI script if you like. This should be
good practice for error handling, since not all RSS files have the
same information. Some have Slashdot-style articles, with a headline,
an article summary, and a link. Some just have a date and a paragraph
about the author's cat. For extra credit, try making a module for
generating HTML output (preferably valid HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0---with
a seperate module, you just code the support once, and never worry
about validity again). If you make an extra layer on top of that, you
could generate output in more formats, like LaTeX. This is probably
overkill, but you did say that you wanted programs to write. :-)

Have fun, and good luck!