We've covered a wide variety of topics in this chapter, from strings to files, to object serialization, and back again. Now it's time to consider how these ideas can be applied to your own code.
Python strings are very flexible, and Python is an extremely powerful tool for string-based manipulations. If you don't do a lot of string processing in your daily work, try designing a tool that is exclusively intended for manipulating strings. Try to come up with something innovative, but if you're stuck, consider writing a web log analyzer (how many requests per hour? How many people visit more than five pages?) or a template tool that replaces certain variable names with the contents of other files.
Spend a lot of time toying with the string formatting operators. Simply write a bunch of template strings and objects to pass into the format function, and see what kind of output you get. Try the exotic formatting operators, like percentage or hexadecimal notation. Try out the fill and alignment...