Python online practice challenges

My review of PyBites and Python Morsels.

These are both sites that let you practice and hone your Python programming skills.

Pybites

In PyBites, you can find almost 300 hundred exercises called “Bites”, with 4 different categories of difficulty: intro, beginner, intermediate and advanced. The progression is really well done in the sense that you could search for a specific topic unfamiliar to you and learn it by doing related exercises from beginner to advanced, to this end Bites are searchable and they are tagged by the topics and knowledge required to solve them, for example, a “find most common word” Bite is tagged with: list comprehension, Counter and data analysis.

PyBites encourages you to practice daily by tracking and showing the days you have worked, a method they refer to as the Seinfeld's Productivity Secret

Another thing they do which I really like is “Ninja Belts”, by completing Bites you earn points, by having sufficient points you advance in belt category, they start at the yellow belt, then orange, green, blue, brown and finally black. I’m currently a Blue belt Ninja and I even get a certificate you can see here.

You can sign up here and try all intro Bites for free (and 4 beginner Bites, 2 intermediate and 1 advanced). After that, for it's $20/month to have access to all the Bites.

Python Morsels

With Python Morsels you sign up to get a weekly exercise by email and a few days after you get possible solutions with explanations. Upon signup, you can choose between novice, intermediate, or advanced skill levels. The recommended process is to work on the problem on Monday and Tuesday, review the solutions on Wednesday and a few days later go back and redo the exercises having learned what worked for you first and what the provided solutions were.

This might seem like too much of a hassle but it’s really an excellent way to learn writing better and more “Pythonic” code since the provided solutions offer many insights on the different ways of getting to a solution with Python and you get to think really deep on the ways you approach solving an exercise and what alternatives you could take that could make your code more efficient, readable, organized and more beautiful overall.

Click here to sign up for Python Morsels you can get a month for free, that is 4 exercises to try out and then if you want to keep it going it’s also $20/month.