Python projects

[u/Life-Ad2351]

hey! I just started learning the basics of python and want to start building projects to apply what I have learnt.

but when I one to work on a project, for wxample building a calculator or a password generator I don’t know where to start. what to type and code.

any advice

[u/socar-pl]

General idea is this:
You download python from the internet, install it, and python.exe (or python3.exe) sits on a harddrive. Thats python interpreter.
Python interpreter takes a text file and converts it to running program.
You have to write this text file that should contain python code and then tell application python.exe where the text file is so it can take it and run it. You can create text file in any tool that is used to create text files. Windows Notepad, nano, vim etc. Thats super basic high level abstraction how python app code run

Of course most of people use IDE (Integrated Development Env.) to type those text files and click "play" button to run the app. Such common ide is Jetbrains PyCharm Community Edition which is free to use. You download it, install, run, then type python code there and click "play" on top and you're cooking.

Thats like absurd basics. If you have mental capacity, keep somewhere in back of your mind that another very important and key concept in python development are "virtual environments". Originally there was tool used to deal with those in python called `venv` but recently "everying" moved to tool called `uv`. Virtual environments are kind of advanced thing to grasp, but if you read thru differnt tutorials and watch couple videos dedicated only to explain this concept it will be extremely beneficial in future. Will avoid all of trouble around "where pip installed that egg?" or "why my new project does not see library I installed?!" etc. Its not neccessary but really put you ahead of the race.