You’ve finished a course or finally made it to the end of a book that teaches you the basics of programming with Python. You’ve learned about variables, lists, tuples, dictionaries, for and while loops, conditional statements, object-oriented concepts, and more. So, what’s next? What can you do with Python nowadays?
Python is a versatile programming language with many use cases in a variety of different fields. If you’ve grasped the basics of Python and are itching to build something with the language, then it’s time to figure out what your next step should be.
In this article, you’ll see how you can use Python for:
Doing general software development
Diving into data science and math
Speeding up and automating your workflow
Building embedded systems and robots
You’ll also find ideas for practical projects, resources, and tutorials that you can use to start building things with Python right away.
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Contents
Python in the Real World
Python is a high-level and general-purpose programming language. As this definition implies, you can use Python for several purposes, from web development to data science, machine learning, and robotics. Python’s real-world use cases are limitless.
You’re probably wondering what people are successfully building with Python. If you take a quick look at companies using the language, then you’ll find world-class companies, such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, Netflix, and more.
Google has used Python from the start, and it’s gained a place as one of the tech giant’s main server-side languages. Guido van Rossum, Python’s creator, worked there for several years, overseeing the language’s development.
Instagram likes Python for its simplicity. The service is known for running “the world’s largest deployment of the Django web framework, which is written entirely in Python.”
Spotify uses the language for data analysis and back-end services. According to its team, Python’s ease of use leads to a lightning-fast development pipeline. Spotify performs a ton of analysis to give recommendations to its users, so it needs a productive tool that works well. Python to the rescue!
You’ll also find that Python has been vital for science and space exploration, with a lot of exciting use cases in robotics and hardware control.
In this article, you’ll see how you can use your Python skills in a wide range of areas.
Develop Cool Software
Python’s ecosystem provides a rich set of frameworks, tools, and libraries that allow you to write almost any kind of application. You can use Python to build applications for the Web as well as desktop and mobile platforms. You can even use Python to create video games.
Web Development
Developing web applications with Python is one of the most in-demand skills, with a lot of opportunities for you out there. In this field, you’ll find several useful Python frameworks, libraries, and tools for developing cool web applications, APIs, and more. Here are some of the most popular Python web frameworks:
Framework
Description
Django
Django is a high-level framework that encourages rapid web application development with a clean and pragmatic design. It allows you to focus on writing your applications without having to reinvent the wheel.
FastAPI
FastAPI is a fast and performant web framework for building web APIs. It’s built on top of modern Python type hint features and enables asynchronous programming.
Flask
Flask is a lightweight framework for creating WSGI web applications. It allows you to get started quickly and to scale up to complex applications if needed.
Tornado
Tornado is a web framework and asynchronous networking library. It uses non-blocking network I/O, so you can write applications that can scale to tens of thousands of open connections.
To get started with web development, check out:
Python Web Development Tutorials
Django Tutorials
Flask Tutorials
If you want some practical project ideas for applying your web development skills right away, then you can build a portfolio web application with Django. With so many jobs and career opportunities out there, it’s a great idea to have a personal portfolio these days, so go ahead and give it a try. You don’t need to know anything about Django to get started with this step-by-step tutorial. It’s perfect if you’re itching to get your hands dirty with web development in Python.
CLI Development
Another field in which Python shines is command-line interface (CLI) application development. CLI applications are everywhere and allow you to automate repetitive and boring tasks in your day-to-day work by creating small and large tools for your command line.
In Python, you have an impressive set of CLI libraries and frameworks that can make your life more pleasant and help you build command-line tools quickly:
Read the full article at https://realpython.com/what-can-i-do-with-python/ »
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