Python Programming: 3 Books in 1- The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Learn Python Programming Effectively + Tips and Tricks to learn Python Programming+ Strategies( Python Programming) by Daniel Jones

Author:Daniel Jones
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2017-08-01T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Work on Open-Source Software

One of the best opportunities to budding programmers lies in the open source software movement. There are many different factors which make this such a great opportunity.

First, though, we’re going to conquer the bigger topic at hand: what exactly is open source software? Open source software is the notion of writing software that is not only free but where the source is completely and freely available to any programmers that are aspiring to read it, contribute to it, or branch off of it.

What does this mean for you? Well, quite a bit actually. The first and foremost thing that it means for you is that you can find a wealth of already developed Python programs that are available for you to look at. Often, due to their public nature, they’ll be well documented and well commented too. What this means for you is that as you work your way through the code trying to understand what does what, you’ll often have comments to the side explaining what code does. This can be great for understanding core functions of a heavily used API, for example, or even just understanding the logic which other programmers work with and use on a daily basis.

Additionally, it means that you can aspire to build onto a given program if you’d like. A great number of these projects will often need somebody to add on to them and fix bugs. In fact, that whole idea that people will do such is a major reason that people opt to create open source programs in the first place.

Another really cool thing that you can do with open source programs is actually create “spin-off” programs, or programs for either your personal use or for the programming community at large that are based on the code of an open source software. Note that by the nature of open source software this should generally be allowed, but some people may specifically disallow the creation of spin off programs of their software as part of a licensing agreement to accessing the open source software. Also, if you’re going to publicly claim that the software is anything but somebody else’s, then you should have created very specific and concrete changes to the software to justify doing such. What’s more, as a general unspoken rule of open source etiquette, you generally should generally credit the original programmers and developers in any branching projects that you may have a hand in.

There are a great number of open source Python projects that you can get started with cracking open and trying to understand right now. Among these are the likes of an open source Minecraft clone (a great starting point because it lets you see the results of your actions immediately), a script for downloading YouTube videos called youtube-dl, and the super popular web framework Django. I’ll give a brief summary of all of these.

It’s worth noting that you can browse quite a few open source Python projects yourself over at GitHub by heading to https://github.

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