What exactly you can do with Python?

If you are going to learn Python or have recently started learning it, you may have the question, "What exactly can you do with Python?" Well, it's a tricky question to answer because there are various applications of Python. But, I will tell you about the three main applications of Python: web development, machine learning, and scripting. Let's get started with web development.

1. Web Development

Django and Flask are very popular Python frameworks for web development. These are widely used nowadays for creating server-side code (backend code) for applications in Python. Backend code runs on the server-side, while front-end code runs on the user's devices. Why do you need a framework for web development? It helps in mapping complex URLs to HTML pages and assists in creating, handling, and managing databases. 

Which framework should you use? 

Django and Flask are very user-friendly frameworks. I suggest Django if you are planning to build a website like a blog, news, e-commerce, etc. It gives you more control over the admin panel and databases. You can also go for Flask if you are just a beginner in web development. If you are looking to start with Django, then I recommend the book "Django for Beginners" or you can also follow YouTube channels.

2. Machine Learning

Machine learning is an immense topic, and it is difficult to explain all of it here. I will try to make it brief. It is better to describe machine learning by giving an example. 

Let's say you want a program that will automatically detect objects in an image. You have pictures of cats and chairs, and you want your program to automatically recognize which picture has a cat or chair. If I ask you, "You can quickly tell me," but in your program, it is not that easy. How do you recognize it quickly? It is because you have past experience. Your program needs to learn in the same way. You need to feed it with lots of pictures of cats and chairs and tell it which one is a cat and which one is a chair. 

After that, it can correctly recognize which one is a cat and which one is a chair. That is what we call model training in machine learning. Later, when you provide the image, it can quickly recognize the image. This is how we train and test machine learning models. 

Other domains in machine learning are recommendation systems (like movie recommendations, product recommendations), face recognition, and voice recognition. There are lots of machine learning algorithms you may have heard of, such as neural networks, random forests, support vector machines, and deep learning.

 You can use any one of them to solve the above problem of cat and chair. If you are curious to start, then you can start with built-in machine learning algorithms in Scikit-learn and TensorFlow. Scikit-learn comes with built-in algorithms. 

TensorFlow is a kind of low-level library that allows you to build custom machine learning algorithms. Keep in mind that you need to know the basic concepts of calculus and linear algebra to get started with algorithms or any machine learning courses. 

Kaggle is the best place to practise machine learning problems and algorithms. You can also find nice tutorials for starting machine learning.

3. Scripting

What is scripting? A script is a small, interpreted program that can perform a series of tasks and make decisions when a specific condition is met. Let's take a situation where you have to download videos using links that you have. Now, you have to copy and paste all the URLs into the browser and wait until the video downloads. 

Scripting will make this easy for you. It will hit all the URLs in the browser one after the other and save the video automatically. That's the power of scripting. You can write the script in Python or any other scripting language, but Python has easy-to-understand syntax.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Python has various applications, including web development, machine learning, and scripting. For web development, Django and Flask are popular frameworks that assist in creating server-side code and managing databases. Machine learning involves training models to recognize patterns and make predictions, and Scikit-learn and TensorFlow are useful tools for building machine learning algorithms. Scripting involves writing small programs to automate tasks, and Python's easy-to-understand syntax makes it a popular choice for scripting. Overall, Python is a versatile language with many practical uses.