It also depends on what you want to get out of programming. From a pragmatic perspective: One option is to look at code that's embedded into other platforms.

It also depends on what you want to get out of programming. From a pragmatic perspective: One option is to look at code that's embedded into other platforms. You talk about data analysis. Perhaps try looking at OpenOffice (which I know has Python bindings). Import your data and get OO to do the heavy lifting of creating the graphs. Remember: The whole point of programming is that you get shit done by giving a general purpose system specific instructions to carry out. For large parts of the "Build an application" questions you have. It depends on the tool you use. If you're building an iOS app -- XCode includes Interface Builder (which lets you drag and drop GUI objects and link parts of your code to them). If you started coding in something like Visual Basic you'd have the same thing. These sort of tools make it easy because the design a gui and package the app are all baked in. A Web example is probably PHP. For Python you can look at tools like pyGame or wxWidgets