One thing I always not see people recommending is what small open source projects I can study or do while or after reading these books. Like for web development, people try to implement a small todo, blogging software. For someone coming from higher level languages like Python, Ruby, studying low level library is very tough to grasp. Having small but a proper project in itself will be helpful. I have heard praises about Redis and SQLite, but for beginners, they are quite big.

So any suggestions?