For beginners, trying themselves in a Python open source project may become quite a cognitive time spending. Taking into account that during the last five years the Python is widely recognized as a “Most popular coding language”, in many, thanks to the high readability extent and the efficiency it gained the extensive fan-audience of developers. But how to start working with the Python if you have never had the luck to get closer to it? The answer is simple. Nothing is capable of teaching you to understand the Python code better than contributing to some of the open source projects.
The open source project is a project publicly available. Everyone can take existing open-source projects, read its code, modify it, use it, and publish their own changes again under the relevant Open Source licenses.
For the newbies, the open source is first of all the opportunity to get practice in a real project and a good chance to find help in exchange for their own time dedicated to the project.
Nowadays, beginners have unlimited permanent access to many open source projects. For example, the software co-development web service Github makes it is possible to study directly inside of it. Reading a few lines of code will be much more profitable than reading 500 pages of the programming manual.
In addition, open source is a good opportunity to learn to programme by reading the code of the leading professionals of this field. In such a case the only thing the beginners have to do is to spend a bit of their time and get knowledge, experience, and the opinion of the masters of coding.
For those who have already learned other coding languages like PHP, C++, Java, it would be a piece of cake to learn the basics of Python web development. On the other hand, exactly because of that, the Python frequently is not recognized as a ‘must have’ programming skill. Nevertheless, Python was recognized as one of the best open source coding languages. According to most of the statistics, it stands on the second place right behind Java. The CPython open source interpreter which is the default reference of Python supports imperative, functional and object-oriented paradigms.
Among the most popular open source software developed with Python are SciPy, PyGTK, Django, OpenStack, Mercurial, YUM, Dropbox, Blender, and BitBake as well as many others. But it’s all of the most widely known projects. However, Python deals not only with them. There are many more open-source products, totally free and available to everyone.
In 2018, the following libraries, frameworks, and utilities became the most wanted among programmers. Their repositories are actively developing and improving. Every self-respecting pythonist should get to know them, especially since they are dealing with almost all popular areas of development. Here are the open source projects, which might come in handy for the beginners and are worth to be mentioned:
- TensorFlow Models – an open source repository where you can find many libraries and deep learning models.
- Keras – a high- level neural network API written in Python and capable to work on top of TensorFlow, CNTK or Theano. It was designed specifically for conducting fast experiments.
- Flask – one of the easiest to use web development frameworks based on the WSGI standard. Was designed for the quick launch of applications with the function to change the scale.
- Scikit-learn – a machine learning module (add-on) created on the basis of the SciPy and distributed under the BSD 3-Clause license.
- Zulip – powerful group chat combining real-time processing speed and streaming performance. The application is used by a number of companies from the Fortune’s 500 list, which is capable of handling thousands of messages per day
- Django – a high-level web framework capable to facilitates quick development
To sum up, open source projects are kind of books in the world of programming and plenty of them are available for beginners to read. Each of them can teach something new if to be inspected carefully and attentively.
