Where to Go Next

You've written Python that runs. So what now? Below are the resources I keep pointing people toward after a workshop like this one. Don't bookmark them all. Pick one or two and ignore the rest until you've actually used those.

Keep coding things

The honest answer to "how do I get better at Python?" is: keep writing it. Small finished projects beat big half-finished ones every time.

• Automate the Boring Stuff with Python — a free online book that teaches Python by getting you to build genuinely useful things: renaming files in bulk, scraping web pages, automating spreadsheets. The author lets you read the whole thing online for free.
• Exercism — Python track — free practice problems with optional mentor feedback. You solve a puzzle, a real human reads your code, tells you what they'd change, and you try again. Closest thing to a code review without having a job yet.

Learn the fundamentals properly

A workshop only teaches you the shape of Python. For everything underneath, you'll want a longer course.

• freeCodeCamp — Scientific Computing with Python — free, runs in your browser, broken into short exercises. The certification at the end is one of the few that hiring managers will actually recognize.
• CS50P — Harvard's free Python course on edX. The lecturer is funny, the problem sets are tough, and finishing it is a real accomplishment.

References to bookmark forever

• The official Python docs — the tutorial near the top is friendlier than people expect, and the rest of the site is the reference every working Python developer keeps open in another tab.
• W3Schools Python — when you forget how to do one specific thing (reverse a list, format a date), this is usually the fastest place to find the answer.

YouTube channels worth subscribing to

• Tech With Tim — Python projects from beginner to intermediate. Calm, well paced, and the project ideas don't feel like throwaway demos.
• Programming with Mosh — his free six-hour Python tutorial is well produced and worth a watch.

When you outgrow Colab

Colab is great for sketches, but eventually you'll want Python on your own computer with real files in a real folder.

• Thonny — a Python editor built for beginners. It shows you what your code is doing one line at a time, which is the fastest way I know to figure out why a loop is misbehaving.
• python.org — the official Python installer. You need this on your computer before any editor can run Python.
• VS Code — free, and what most working developers use. Install the Python extension and it becomes a full Python editor.

If games caught your eye

• Pygame Zero — built for teaching. You can have something moving on screen in about ten lines of code.
• Pygame — the bigger library Pygame Zero is built on top of. Step up to it once you want more control over what's happening on screen.