This is something that I tried to cover when I wrote my book (Hello! Python). Most experienced devs will have a library of stuff which they crib from to get going, or which solves tricky problems or library issues that they had.

Beginners don't have that, so I picked as wide a variety of programs as I could get away with for each chapter. Presto! More-or-less-instant set of bits for creating simple UIs, games, business-y programming (csv, web scraping+parsing, emailing, etc.)