This repo accompanies a blog post that discusses how to use some Python and C libraries to manipulate, filter, and project Shapefile datasets.
You can find the blog post here: https://openshift.redhat.com/community/blogs/using-open-source-gis-tools-for-spatial-data-qgis-gdal-python
I have included a couple sample datasets in the repo so you can give it a try. Please also check out the first blog post in the series that explains where the data comes from, what is a shapefile, and what are projections.