Congratulations! You now know enough about Python to start building interactive and meaningful projects. Creating your own projects will teach you new skills and solidify your understanding of the concepts introduced in Part I.
Part II contains three kinds of projects, and you can choose to do any or all of these projects in whichever order you like. Here’s a brief description of each project to help you decide which to dig into first.
In the Alien Invasion project (Chapters 12, 13, and 14), you’ll use the Pygame package to develop a 2D game. The goal of the game is to shoot down a fleet of aliens as they drop down the screen, in levels that increase in speed and difficulty. At the end of the project, you’ll have learned skills that will enable you to develop your own 2D games in Pygame.
The Data Visualization projects start in Chapter 15, where you’ll learn to generate data and create a series of functional and beautiful visualizations of that data using Matplotlib and Plotly. Chapter 16 teaches you to access data from online sources and feed it into a visualization package to create plots of weather data and a map of global earthquake activity. Finally, Chapter 17 shows you how to write a program to automatically download and visualize data. Learning to make visualizations allows you to explore the field of data science, which is one of the highest-demand areas of programming today.
In the Web Application project (Chapters 18, 19, and 20), you’ll use the Django package to create a simple web application that allows users to keep a journal about different topics they’ve been learning about. Users will create an account with a username and password, enter a topic, and then make entries about what they’re learning. You’ll also deploy your app to a remote server so anyone in the world can access it.
After completing this project, you’ll be able to start building your own simple web applications, and you’ll be ready to delve into more thorough resources on building applications with Django.