I’ve completed the Python For Everybody course taught by Dr. Charles Severance at the University of Michigan on Coursera. All that’s left is the capstone project to put into practice what I’ve learned, but as I’m doing this to learn Python and not for the official certificate, I’m going to skip it. The course is taught in Python 2.7 and I want to shift to Python 3.x.

Python For Everybody was great. The pace and the exercises were perfect for the class. I wish I had realized sooner that there were additional exercises in the textbook that were not part of the required Coursera class. The fourth class, Python and Databases, was intense. The speed of the class was accelerated with teaching you SQL and how Python connects to databases (SQLlite specifically). The homework was much more simple in Python for Databases compared to the first three sessions. You usually had to only make some minor changes in the SQL syntax to complete the grade.

The two things I’m going to need to focus on to have success in building the two apps I want to build are dictionaries (from importing statistics via JSON) and databases. If I walked away from one thing from the Python for Databases class is that I’m going to need to spend some time with paper and pencil and plan my information architecture and database models if I’m going to be successful.

Next I’m going to start Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps by Michael Kennedy of the Talk Python podcast. I supported the Kickstarter earlier this year and am excited now that I hope I have enough of a base understanding of Python to tackle this. This will be taught in Python 3.x (yay!) and I’m hoping now that I have that base knowledge, building these apps along with the tutorials included will give the practice I need to later build a real app. It’s also going to go into a little more detail than what I’ve learned so far on list comprehension (which makes my head hurt), BeautifulSoup for web scraping, and Classes.

I also supported Mr. Kennedy’s next Kickstarter, Python for Entrepreneurs. This also has me excited as the second phase of building my fantasy sports app will be deploying it on the web. The description looks perfect for what I’ll need, in addition to learning the web framework Pyramid:

You will learn to build and design your web app

This course will teach you how to build a data-driven web application in Python.

We will:

**• Build our web app with the Pyramid web framework, "the Python web framework that supports your decisions, by artisans for artisans."

**

• Create and connect to our database using SQLAlchemy, the most popular data access layer in Python

**• Learn the core elements of web design including CSS and front-end frameworks such as Bootstrap.

**

Time to get to work.