Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, 2nd Edition: Practical Programming for Total Beginners

By Al Sweigart

Learn how to code while you write programs that effortlessly perform useful feats of automation!

The second edition of this international fan favorite includes a brand-new chapter on input validation, Gmail and Google Sheets automations, tips for updating CSV files, and more.

If you've ever spent hours renaming files or updating spreadsheet cells, you know how tedious tasks like these can be. But what if you could have your computer do them for you? Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, 2nd Edition teaches even the technically uninclined how to write programs that do in minutes what would take hours to do by hand—no prior coding experience required!

This new, fully revised edition of Al Sweigart’s bestselling Pythonic classic, Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, covers all the basics of Python 3 while exploring its rich library of modules for performing specific tasks, like scraping data off the Web, filling out forms, renaming files, organizing folders, sending email responses, and merging, splitting, or encrypting PDFs. There’s also a brand-new chapter on input validation, tutorials on automating Gmail and Google Sheets, tips on automatically updating CSV files, and other recent feats of automations that improve your efficiency.

Detailed, step-by-step instructions walk you through each program, allowing you to create useful tools as you build out your programming skills, and updated practice projects at the end of each chapter challenge you to improve those programs and use your newfound skills to automate similar tasks. Boring tasks no longer have to take to get through—and neither does learning Python!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781593279936

Reviews for Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, 2nd Edition

[evanharmon · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Al Sweigart is a really great writer that takes the time and effort to be really clear and explanatory. There are lots of great ways to apply what you learn in this book to your everyday life which is really crucial to make what you learn stick. You can't go wrong with this book!

[frenzie_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I only skimmed this as not being a total beginner it didn't have much to teach me, but it looked like a decent introduction. For a fair amount of stuff in this book my first instinct would be to use a quick shell script, but let's be honest: Python can often be much easier to read and write. That probably doesn't mean I'll change my habits but it's good to reflect on which tool is most effective for the job.If you don't know about it, reading up on regular expressions is something you must absolutely do. It might as well be from this book. Then there's other stuff like generating random quiz files which is always good to know. There was one thing that was completely new to me: I'd never heard of PyAutoGUI. It could be interesting for automated form filling, although I have no present use for it. Oh yeah, and the book isn't one of those super dry programming books. Occasionally it can be quite funny.

[markm2315 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have a few other introductions to Python, but this one was especially appealing to me. Its example applications are very practical, and it covers regular expressions, file handling, web scraping, working with MSWord and MS Excel files, and handling image files and e-mails.