My first Python app was a Windows automation script that took a data dump from SQL Server and ran it through Tableau's data visualization software, to produce a

My first Python app was a Windows automation script that took a data dump from SQL Server and ran it through Tableau's data visualization software, to produce a daily report on various metrics our company was interested in. The enterprise Tableau product was outside our price range, so this was a good way to hack together a solution using the desktop version and our raw data from SQL Server. As it so happened, Python turned out to have the best libraries for working with output from SQL Server, automating the opening and control of the desktop Tableau app in Windows, and then formatting certain Excel output appropriately (some of the data was graphs, some of it was direct output to Excel in a complex pivot table format). Python is really powerful for a whole host of things. As people have pointed out, choose a project that you want to get done, and then start coding it. I have never liked just trying to cram through an entire O'Reilly book, for instance. It's kind of like reading an encyclopedia cover to cover. Much better to focus on a problem that might incorporate a few different competencies. Personally, the tabbing in Python drives me nuts. Working in it convinced me that I really like brackets. I'm sure I'll get flamed for this comment, but I think it's just a mental processing thing. Some people work well with white space (VB being another example), others don't. I've always liked being able to use brackets as a reference point. Whitespace doesn't do it for me, even if I have the tab characters show up in code.