Python exercises to hone your skills

Question

Is there a place with little coding projects you can do to hone your skills? Preferably with answers to compare your code to and/or look at if you can't figure it out.

a good example of such a site is http://www.hackthissite.org, which has little web security tutorials to help you learn about vulnerabilities and ways people might hack a (your) website.

For me one of the biggest things when becoming familiar with new modules etc is trying to use them and looking at other people's code. Unfortunately many times there is no sample code in the documentation.

edit: Here's what I've found so far, organized by difficulty...

Absolute Beginner

• A Python Course - Uta Priss

Moderate Ability

• How to Think Like a Computer Scientist
• Bembry.org python exercises
• Python Challenge - As suggested by jdd, this one is more of a game (and it's quite addictive) but also makes you learn about python which is awesome!

Complex Programming Problems

Havn't found any

Answer 1

http://osix.net/modules/geek/ is good for random coding challenges you can solve in your language of choise.

Answer 2

I honed my Python skills by participating in PyWeek. It's a competition to make a video game in one week with Python. It's a friendly competition, the people are very helpful, and its a great way to get motivated to learn general, object oriented Python. Many of the entrants code their games in PyGame, a 2D (mostly) game library for Python.
Most of the programmers I've worked with have at some time entertained the idea of making video games, and it's how a lot of us got into the industry to begin with. Python + game programming = fun while learning.

Answer 3

Python Challenge

Project Euler - when you answer a question, you are able to see and discuss other peoples solutions.

ACM programming challenges

Some python problems focusing on science / math

Answer 4

Albeit the ICFP Programming Contest is not really for little coding projects, the last problems were always interesting and you can compare your python program to programs in other languages.

Answer 5

Try to solve Google Code Jam problems in python. Small and big input files. Start with practice contest then move on hardest contest, there are really hard problems ;)

Answer 6

Thanks for the links.

PS there's no such word as 'addicting'.