What to program..

[TylerB]

Hello everyone!
I've been having a great time learning about programming and such, but I'm lost as to what to do. I don't know what to program, at all. I'm learning python and have been reading several books/tutorials which have taught me quite a bit, but I don't know what to do with it. Do any of you have websites with programming challenges or something? I've been working on python challenge (http://www.pythonchallenge.com) lately and it's quite fun. Any help or posts are appreciated, thanks,

Tyler

[briancurtin]

one thing you could do is take something you do every day, and write a program for it. im going back and learning python right now actually, just starting from the ground up (since i skimmed over it before).

i dont really check stocks, but i thought about a way to write a script to hit the yahoo finance page and check a list of stocks. i did it a few months ago after running through a tutorial before i went back to school. after i finish up this book, i want to make an application to check and monitor stock prices, and have it email me when a stock hits a high or a low that i have set. i dont even care about stocks, and i dont have anything invested, but it is a useful application that can help me learn even more.

just take something you do every day, and try to replicate it (or make it better) with python. if you like sports and check sports pages, look for a way to check a certain team's record or a player's stats. if you want to run daily backups, write a script to backup all of your stuff and email you when its ready. i have a few ideas for what i want to work on and im just going to keep going with them so i can learn as much as i can.

[commodore]

Play real time battle: http://realtimebattle.sourceforge.net/

[raublekick]

hey guys, since this is somewhat of a newbie python thread, can you point me in the direction of some good (hopefully free, online) resources? i decided i want to learn some python and gui stuff while i'm on break.

to tie it back to the original post, i decided to make a simple bank statement manager with a gui. i'm sure gnucash does this, but i don't need a lot of financing stuff, just something to track my bank statements and balances. seems like an easy enough project, but i'll probably have to learn all about XML too and make a file format.

[Norberg]

For learning Python i would recomend the Python Tutorial at http://docs.python.org/tut/

[Hanj]

Programming games can be really fun too, at least if you enjoy working with graphics and sound effects and such. There are tons of game programming contests, check out gamedev.net for example.