Well, congratulations, you've made it to the end of the course and you now have this awesome new skill
of Python, right?
You're not an expert, you know, it's not like you can just do this in your sleep now, but you've
gotten a solid head start and you may be thinking, OK, where do I go next?
I've got four potential options.
Obviously, you can do whatever you'd like, but these are places that I think are sort of natural.
Next steps for you if you've enjoyed learning Python.
So I'm going to be referencing a couple of really practical links and you can get them at Tampico Dotcom
Slash weekend.
This is the same page that we've been using throughout the course.
But in case you skipped here to the end, wanted to make sure you had access to that.
So the first one is Web development.
So to me, this is one of the greatest ways to use Python.
It's the back end part of a website.
If you ever heard the terms like a website consists of both the front end, which is mostly the design,
and then the back end is sort of the nitty gritty stuff.
Python is amazing for that back end stuff.
You can't use it for the front end.
That's more like JavaScript, HTML access, those types of things.
But again, Python is amazing on the back end.
There's two really popular frameworks when it comes to doing websites with Python.
So the first one is Flask.
This one is very bare bones.
This is if you want to see exactly how to create a website and you have this whole Web server that's
managing everything and you want to get nitty nitty gritty, this is your option personally.
It takes way too much effort, in my opinion.
Like, I never need as much control as Flask provides.
But it is still very interesting.
And I've I've done a little bit in the flask world and it's been really enlightening to think, oh,
OK, there's a lot that goes into making websites and being a web developer for handling all those transactions.
But my personal recommendation, a framework that I absolutely love, is Jianguo.
So the reason that this is my personal favorite is because it helps you get stuff up and running quickly
without doing too much.
In my opinion, I used to use a Web framework called Ruby on Rails.
In my opinion, it was like too much control around what was happening that if I ever deviated, I felt
like I was off the path.
If I want to do something slightly custom that the whole thing just blew up, that's maybe a little
bit of an exaggeration.
But I really like Django.
I think it has a nice sort of balance there about how that works.
And kind of proof is in the pudding.
My whole website that I've created is written in Django and I've even open source that so you can check
it out.
So I would recommend checking out one of these two frameworks.
Again, my recommendation is going to be Django.
I actually have several courses teaching Django, but the one that I really recommend is on Django three,
and it's sort of a nice intro to, you know, hey, you've already got this python skill.
How do you go use it to go make websites.
So let's take a look at that real quick.
So we'll scroll here, become a web developer with Django.
So again, this is a link to my courser.
You can also just find on tab code if you hit courses, you can see the other Django courses that I
have.
The other thing that might be interesting to you is if you go to the code part of my section, you can
see my entire website.
This is the code that's running on the website.
This is Django right here.
And so you can actually see all the changes that I have.
I have a little guide here about how to run my website on your computer locally.
That's kind of a fun thing to go through.
And you can see all the different changes that I've been making on this over time.
So if you do get into Django, that might be sort of a fun thing for you to follow.
OK, let's go ahead and get back to the list.
All right.
Data science, if you really enjoyed the word counter project, I have an inkling you might like data
science.
It's not like the anything that we made is close to what you do with data science, but what is data
science?
It's basically making sense of really big sets of numbers and things.
And so it can go to a lot of different places.
It can be graphing that it can be doing like some statistical analysis.
But it's basically saying, you know, I really want to dive into these large sets of data and I'm going
to use this programming language python to do it.
It really sort of lets you do almost anything that you want, like you saw the power of for loops that
we were working with.
Right.
Like, so you can really crunch out some things.
This is probably not super connected to the data science world.
But for example, once I wanted to really test and see if you flipped a coin a bunch of times, would
it really be fifty fifty?
And so I used the python random function I loop through.
I think I simulated like 30000 coin flips or something like that.
Now obviously this gets into some debate about, you know, how random is the python random function.
But it's just cool that you can.
Simulate and try things out in code that would be so impossible in the real world, right?
Like if I was going to flip a coin 30 thousand times, it would be bad news.
So I have a really practical sort of sample tutorial for you to check out.
This is from a website, Real Python dot com.
They have awesome stuff.
All right.
So here's their site.
And this is just sort of a little tutorial with pandas, which is a way to work with data, a framework.
And I think you'll get a pretty good idea if you get, like, halfway through this and you're really
interested and you're like, yeah, this is cool.
I want to see, like, data science could be for you.
If you go halfway through this and you're like, I feel like I'm in math classes is terrible.
Maybe, you know, web developer machine learning something else is for you because I think you'll know
quickly if this is not for you machine learning.
So I've talked about this a little bit throughout the course, but it's basically the idea of teaching
computers to do something to make decisions.
And so a really great practical example of this is you can use machine learning to create a spam filter.
So whether you get like spam text messages or spam emails, you can start by making it's a machine learning
model and saying, OK, you have to manually say, all right, I got these one hundred emails and these
20 particular emails or spam, while these eighty were legitimate and you keep inputting data into this
model.
And eventually over time it starts to say, oh, you know, I find that spam tends to have X, Y and
Z thing in in the subject line and this sort of stuff in the body.
And over time, eventually, if you can teach the spam filter well enough, it will be able to say,
oh, I'm pretty sure this thing is spam or I'm not really sure.
Maybe you'll have to make the decision.
But machine learning is used everywhere.
It's part of how, like algorithms are made like in Twitter, what tweets they think should be shown
to you sort of up at the top.
The one that I think is absolutely amazing is YouTube.
I swear, almost every time I'm done watching a YouTube video, it says you probably want to watch this.
And I'm like, yeah, I do want to watch that one.
It's it's almost creepy, like how great it is.
But I'm also, like, amazed, like, yeah, this is awesome.
So anyways, machine learning, if you're interested, I've got another tutorial for you.
This actually comes from a book that Jake here I don't know a ton about him.
I just found that he has a book that he's put out publicly free for use.
That seems to be very good.
I'm like I said, I've done a couple of things with machine learning just to check it out, a few tutorials
here and there.
But I'm not an expert by any means.
So let's go ahead and check out the book real quick.
So we'll click on Get into Machine Learning.
And here you can see this is I specifically linked to a part of his book that talks about machine learning.
So you can go to the full book here.
If you want to see everything again, you can you can buy it here or I know on his website, I mean,
this part is free here.
Let's see if we go to contents.
There we go.
This is sort of the top level.
You can get access the entire thing.
But, you know, if you do enjoy it, I'm sure Jake would love for you to, you know, support him by
buying the book or whatever.
So if you're in the machine learning, this could be a great place to start.
And finally, automation, I feel like this is one of the most fun things you can do, maybe outside
of Web development with Python.
And it is it's basically you can create things specific to you that will help you to achieve things
like.
So I know that sounds just so broad, but for example, I had a blog that I absolutely loved and I wanted
to start my day by reading about an entry from it every day.
This was a blog that had been on the Internet, still is there for like ten years, and I had just recently
found it.
So there were thousands and thousands of posts.
So what I did is I use Python to create this little program that would run every morning and it would
go out and it would go through the thousands of blog posts that had been made.
Pick one random one that I hadn't seen yet.
And then it would text me a link to that at nine a.m. when I usually wake up.
And so it's so cool.
I wake up, my phone goes off, there's a little text, I tap on the link and boom, I'm reading some
random article and it's like that's something that maybe ten other people out in the world would enjoy.
But I absolutely love.
So using Python to really automate something for yourself.
Another great example of this, my brother and I were wanting to go camping one weekend and it was that
for this really popular camping site in California, I don't remember the exact place, but.
We really wanted to get a reservation, but it was this website where is like, you know, you have
to sign up so much in advance and they were all filled out.
But sometimes people would cancel, but you wouldn't know until they canceled.
And usually people are like clicking and refreshing the page fairly regularly.
And so I built something in Python that would check the site.
I think it was every 30 seconds.
And if it found an opening, it sent a text or I think in that case it actually sent a tweet to my brother
and I like, hey, something is open and we actually were able to get a campsite from it.
So again, these are some specific things that it's so fun to use Python to make something better for
yourself.
So awesome.
Awesome resource for this is the Automate the Boring Stuff book.
This guy Al has made some amazing things in this book and it's all free again.
I'm sure he would love your support.
He actually has a course, too, that teaches this.
Let's go ahead and check out his website.
OK, here we go, automate things in your life, and again, this is the book, Automate the Boring
Stuff with Python.
What a title they're free to read under a Creative Commons license.
Really awesome.
So go ahead, poke through, see what's on there.
My favorite stuff, the sort of in here is the web scraping.
Essentially, it's pulling down things from a website to kind of get that data.
I remember in college, some friends and I, we did this to get information from ESPN to stats on particular
players and teams.
We had a way to just automatically pull that information so that we could sort of keep tabs on our favorite
again teams.
But there's just some really awesome stuff in here I think you should check out.
So there you have it.
There's my recommendations for where you should go.
Another sort of fifth option that I didn't even make a slide out for is that, you know, maybe you
want to check out a different programming language.
Again, you may have heard me say, if you can learn one programming language, you really can learn
almost any other one.
So, for example, now, if you want to go learn Swift to make iPhone apps or you want to go learn Cortlandt
to make Android apps, maybe you want to do JavaScript to do some front end web development, whatever
it is.
These concepts that we've learned here are going to work great in a ton of other languages.
You're going to have to learn how those specific programming languages handle them, but learning what
you have here will set you up great there.
So hopefully out of those five things, you have something that you would love to go check out.
And hopefully this has been helpful to you.