I have six books from this company now, three on Linux and three on Python. All are excellent additions to any library. The material they present continues to be easy to understand with every new book I buy from them. Coding is NOT easy, there's a lot of stuff to learn and tons that you've got to commit to memory. These books make the process enjoyable, and they use practical examples that make it a lot easier to understand things like the flow of logic within statements.

Allow me to give a little context: I started with computers in the 80's when I was a kid. BASIC was all I had access to, fun, but not a great start. My first PC came along and I learned DOS, despite the mostly crappy documentation. Linux came along at the end of the 90's and, while it was a great OS back then, documentation held it back on the desktop. Best I could do was get it to boot, so Windows was the only choice for a couple decades.

Flash forward to the present, and I've ditched Windows completely, picked up a couple books (I don't yet own a book on Linux NOT published by No Starch) and I do better now with Linux than I ever did with Windows. Linux documentation quality is also light-years beyond what it was in the 90's, too. I spent a month on Mint and went straight to Arch. Things have changed THAT much.

I am working through this book and haven't finished it yet. I am a long term programmer having programmed for pay in Fortran for multiple jobs. I have been programming for over 30 years and learning an object oriented language requires a shift in perspective. So, I need little in algorithm development but details on the language features is important and capabilities to do the things that were simple in other languages is important to know how to do it in Python. This book is very complementary to the book Think Python, IMHO.

I am working in Data Science and Machine Learning in particular and found that my ability to program in Python was lacking. So far this book has done a very good job familiarizing me with how to do certain critical things in Python. For Data Science having a section on web site data scraping is very important. I could just look how to do this. Also the data structures are much richer and varied. In Fortran you created any complexity in data structure yourself. I highly recommend this book for both new programmers and advanced programmers who need or want to learn Python.

I am a developer who has read many books and articles on Python (and other programming languages). This book is well written, refreshing, and HELPFUL! If you are learning python for the first time and have never written a program, are a business professional looking to “automate the boring stuff”, or an experienced Python programmer, there is literally something here for everyone. The projects are very simple to follow, the author even provides the source code for you if you don’t want to hand code it out (even though I definitely recommend coding along yourself to learn). I have purchased so many books and tools along my learning journey but this one is by far my absolute favorite and the cover is worn with proof of use and love. If your on the fence, this book is simply brilliant and having a copy at home is an essential and so valuable all I can say is DO IT!

This book is intended for beginners, and really breaks down python in a very approachable manner. Despite that being said, I wouldn't recommend this book to a beginner. In the preface, the author mentions that this book uses many bad habits (or at the very least frowned upon habits), which is true. Many of coding examples are inefficient (which, to the author's credit, he acknowledges), and while the code might run, it's not going to be pretty. The projects look worthwhile, and those alone would be what I'd argue makes the book worth it. Many novice developers (as well as intermediate & advanced) can shrug off the idiosyncrasies that are presented in this book, but a person brand new to coding would likely misunderstand the material, ultimately leading to bad habits that'll be harder to unlearn.

For a true beginner, I'd recommend the Python Crash Course book by the same publisher (No Starch Press). The fundamentals are clearly presented, and easy to understand. The foundation developed will be stronger, and you'll be less likely to develop bad habits, since most of the material is presented in a manner consistent with the python community (PEP).

For example, the way variables and input functions are utilized between the two books are drastically different. In this book, user input and assignment is handled as follows:

print('What's your name?')

name = input()

This is inefficient, and somewhat confusing, given that the alternative (as presented in Python Crash Course) is easier. In Python Crash Course, the same outcome is presented as follows:

name = input("What is your name? ")

The print statement asking for the user's name is excessive. If I'm trying to automate the boring stuff, I'm trying to trim the fat - not eat it.

As this book makes very clear from the start, you don’t have to be a programmer to using this book. I’m a professional software engineer that just needed to learn some python automation for work and personal projects. This book helped me get there but I can see how this book really was tailored toward those who are not experienced in programming as it breaks down each section into consumable bits that would seem a bit tedious to someone like me but would be perfectly helpful to someone without programming experience. I was able to skim the first few chapters that teach the language as I’m already versed in programming and was able to glean pythons syntax style pretty quickly. It’s a simple yet elegant language especially compared to others that I use daily. The part about this book that got me all excited was the web scraping section. As a web developer, I deal with web pages a lot and it would be nice to have some scripts that would auto fill forms and interact with the web pages for me as I’m making code changes on the day to day. It would really make my job—even as a developer—super easy, and it has.

Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is an easy-to-read and quick-to-apply Python book with many practical program examples. Thanks, Al!

I didn't do any programming other than simple automation shell scripts after graduation. This summer, I wanted to help my interns build a new MVP (minimum viable product). I was keen to develop some automation tools to help my customers control their cameras. I am glad that I took action to learn and code in Python!

I was lucky to find "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python"! The book cover is eye-catching. The preface is clear about what readers can achieve from the book. The code examples and quizzes are very useful and practical, such as how to find information using Regular Expressions, send text messages with Twilio, and draw text on images. I applied them to build my first Python-based MVP!

Programming is a creative activity. I am happy to create Python tools to help me automate boring and very boring tasks! I want to go further! I continue my Python journey with "Beyond the Basic Stuff with Python"!

I took a coding class using this as its textbook. I found it easy to read and easy to understand.

I'm not new to Python at this point so I have a slightly different take on this book. The premise is that you've never programmed before and you're looking for some life shortcuts that you can do using the Python language. Here's the thing. It's not a complete waste for someone who is familiar (but not advanced). When I was going through this, I got a good explanation of some useful modules that I didn't even know existed. I especially like the pyinputplus module (which was actually created by the author) and put it to immediate use (and saved myself some serious frustration).

If you've been using Python for years, you probably aren't going to get much out of this book. But if you are either a beginner or have familiarity but are not considered "advanced" yet, you may find some useful information in here.

Helt okey intro bok till Python.

Boníssim. Teoria i pràctica alhora.

Elegí que fuera en inglés porque también me preparo para ello y aún así encontré el material muy explícito

Excellent Book for Python learners. Quality of the book is so good that being a thick book containing 500+ pages the printers having taken to bind the book in such a way the binding is not damaged and reading is so smooth.

Author, Book Content, Quality of Book all I am giving 5*.

But only suggestion to Amazon is to speed up delivery by improving the logistics maybe in certain departments related to certain products like books....

It took 5+ days to get the book.

Otherwise all good. Happy.

Thanks Amazon.

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Automate the boring stuff

Automate The Boring Stuff With Python : Practical Programming for Total Beginners

Sean Massey 5 Feb 2023

Automate the boring stuff

Categories: Book Review, Foundation, Intermediate, Skills

If you’ve ever spent hours renaming files or updating hundreds of spreadsheet cells, you know how tedious tasks like these can be. But what if you could have your computer do them for you? In this fully revised second edition of the best-selling classic Automate the Boring Stuff with Python, you’ll learn how to use Python to write programs that do in minutes what would take you hours to do by hand—no prior programming experience required.…

I’ve just finished the final challenge of the final chapter of Al Sweigart’s awesome Automate the Boring Stuff With Python. It has been an immensity enjoyable journey through Python’s basic and intermediate programming skills and I have learnt a great deal about how I will build my applications in Python.

It covers the basics very quickly, Al is really upfront about this though and from my point of view it meant I could brush up some core skills before diving into what feels like some pretty advanced stuff really quickly. Each chapter follows a really clear structure; basic principals, example code typed into IDLE, build a sample project in your editor that Al provides, review, questions about the chapter, Al offers some challenges for you to do yourself. These are done in the style of the technical challenge on The great British Bake Off, by which I mean he offers a description of what app you need to bake, with some essential ingredients you should be using, but leaving plenty of space for you to bake your code, your way. Everything you need is in the book so you will never get lost.

As the books travels through the chapters, some of these example projects combine skills learnt previously and really opened my eyes to the power that can quickly created by the combination of great foundational Python skills and the libraries available to me.

Al’s writing style is conversational and direct, which I found very easy to follow and if you also follow him on Twitter you will see reflects his free-spirited Twitter personality. I’d love to meet him one day to see if it matches his actual personality…I’ll bet it does.

A couple of things to think about while you are using this book;

1. Al (quite deliberately) does not use full PEP8 styling in his code. For me this was not a problem at all, if anything it enhances the accessibility of the book. I found I used his styling when entering code into REPL, but when coding in the IDE I ‘translated’ to PEP8 as this helped me reinforce those skills for myself and also forced me to really understand how the projects work, which helped me when I wrote my own.

2. There have been some changes to APIs and Libraries since the book was published, however the book’s website helps you through this and also has all the download files you need to complete the project, a feature I don’t see in many other books aimed at the same market.

3. You will need to learn a bit about how your operating system manages paths/folders/files which can be a little esoteric. However, Al provides great guidance on this topic and for me this is an essential skill for any Python coder.

4. At first the end of chapter challenges feel a little daunting….believe me if you complete them all (and all the knowledge you need is in the book) then you will improve your understanding of you will build your own applications more quickly then you can imagine!

The areas covered in the book are;

Part I: Python Programming Basics

Chapter 1: Python Basics

Chapter 2: Flow Control

Chapter 3: Functions

Chapter 4: Lists

Chapter 5: Dictionaries and Structuring Data

Chapter 6: Manipulating Strings

Part II: Automating Tasks

Chapter 7: Pattern Matching with Regular Expressions

Chapter 8: Input Validation

Chapter 9: Reading and Writing Files

Chapter 10: Organizing Files

Chapter 11: Debugging

Chapter 12: Web Scraping

Chapter 13: Working with Excel Spreadsheets

Chapter 14: Working with Google Sheets

Chapter 15: Working with PDF and Word Documents

Chapter 16: Working with CSV Files and JSON Data

Chapter 17: Keeping Time, Scheduling Tasks, and Launching Programs

Chapter 18: Sending Email and Text Messages

Chapter 19: Manipulating Images

Chapter 20: Controlling the Keyboard and Mouse with GUI Automation

Appendix A: Installing Third-Party Modules

Appendix B: Running Programs

Appendix C: Answers to the Practice Questions

By the end of this book I could manage files, scrape websites, send SMS’s from Python, look for patterns in massive data sets, manage image files and much more. Thanks Al, I am ready to build my own apps now!