Here are a bunch of examples of simple things you can do by reading and writing text files. Download them all, and run them!
You will need one data file to start things off:
numbers.txt
files_1_read.py
files_2_count.py
files_3_max.py
files_4_copy.py
files_5_counts.py
files_6_doubles.py
files_7_random.py
files_8_rand_wrapped.py