Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: Practical Programming for Total Beginners

The most practical way to learn Python.

automate the boring stuff with python practical programming for total beginners pdf

The following is a review of the book Automate the Boring Stuff with Python by Al Sweigart (Twitter account here)

This Automate the Boring Stuff with Python review is for beginners who want useful scripts for everyday tasks. Start here if files, spreadsheets, and repetitive computer work motivate you; add a separate machine-learning resource when you are ready to build models.

Planning to use Python for machine learning? Read the free Starter Kit excerpt on test sets before your first model. No email required; the full Starter Kit costs €19.

Review of Automate The Boring Stuff with Python

Automate the boring stuff with Python is an awesome book for learning how to program in this amazing language. We love it. Let us explain why.

Choose this book for task automation; choose Python Crash Course if you prefer learning through larger projects. Both teach programming fundamentals. You do not need to finish both before applying Python to your own problem.

Prerequisites: no previous programming experience is required. Work through functions, loops, lists, and dictionaries before skipping ahead to automation chapters; those basics make adapting an example much easier.

You’ll learn how to use Python to write programs that do in minutes what would take you hours to do by hand and once you’ve mastered the basics of programming, you’ll create Python programs that effortlessly perform useful and impressive feats of automation.

After reading this book you’ll realise how many of the things you are tediously doing in your day to day interactions with computer can be sped up with simple Python scripts. These include tasks like searching for text across multiple files, operating with files and folders, surfing the web and even scraping it, sending automatic mails, joining PDFs, and much more!

Each chapter is laid out in a progressive and guided manner (all while coding), and at the end a practice exercise will test how well you understood what you have just learned. Lets take a look at the contents of the book.

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You can find a video review of the book here:

Also, the following series of video lectures goes through almost every chapter of the book in a practical manner with very pedagogical videos by the author. Also, you can find the books official website here.

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python: editions and contents

The chapter list below describes the second edition. The official third edition is free to read online and has a revised structure, including SQLite databases and text recognition. Match examples and installation instructions to your edition.

automate the boring stuff with Python free pdf

Summary of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python

Try this first: read a folder of sample CSV files, validate their column names, and produce one summary file. Print the planned output before writing it, then test on copies. When that works, explore pandas for working with tabular data.

It is a beautifully crafted text that text leads you gently through a clear and concise introduction to the key issues necessary to using Python, whilst guiding the reader towards quality software development. It is a pleasure to read and provides plenty of examples for the user to try. It is Fun to read and easy to work through and we definitely recommend it as a first face to face with programming in Python.

Check out our other Python books here: Python Programming Books.

Also, if you are looking for a course instead of a book, we have an amazing category on Python Programming Online Courses.

Additional online resources to learn elegant and awesome Python are:

For another beginner perspective, consider Think Python or the introductory resources below. Architecture Patterns with Python is a later step for readers who already write Python programs.

Thank you for reading How to Learn Machine learning and have an awesome day!

Tags: Automate the boring stuff with Python, Python Programming Books, Python for Beginners, Best Python Programming Book.

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