In article <mailman.1844.1368963057.3114.python-l...@python.org>, Ned Batchelder <n...@nedbatchelder.com> wrote:
> So here's a question for people who remember coming up from beginner: as > you moved from exercises like those in Learn Python the Hard Way, up to > your own self-guided work on small projects, what project were you > working on that made you feel independent and skilled? What program > first felt like your own work rather than an exercise the teacher had > assigned? IIRC, my first production python projects were a bunch of file parsers. We had a bunch of text file formats that we worked with often. I wrote some state-machine based parsers which slurped them up and gave back the contents in some useful data structure. Many of the files were big, so I added an option to write out a pickled version of the data. The parsing code could then check to see if there was a pickle file that was newer than the text version and read that instead. Big win for speed. Then, of course, a bunch of utilities which used this data to do useful things. I remember one of the utilities that turned out to be really popular was a smart data file differ. You feed it two files and it would tell you how they differed (in a way that was more useful than a plain text-based diff). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
